Veteran Journalist Sounds Alarm On FBI, CIA Purge With Frightening Analysis

Garrett Graff, a veteran journalist and historian, issued a dire national security warning on Wednesday after the CIA offered buyouts to its entire workforce, a move that falls in line with President Donald Trump’s push to fill the federal government with loyalists.

The offer arrives after the Trump administration pushed out several senior FBI officials along with heads of FBI field offices just as bureau leaders were asked to provide a list of those tied to Jan. 6 cases as fears of mass firings loom.

Graff, in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, gave two examples of what a purge of the FBI looks like for the next four years: “9/11” and “corruption.”

“It looks like 9/11 because the FBI that is being neutered right now, particularly the agents working on domestic terror and foreign terror, involved in these Jan. 6 prosecutions, are exactly the people tasked, day in and day out, with preventing the next 9/11,” Graff said.

The analysis appeared to stun Collins, who described it as “remarkable.”

On Tuesday, FBI agents sued the Justice Department in an effort to block the publication of a list of agents linked to Jan. 6 cases or who investigated Trump.

“It is already over, that institution is already dead,” said Graff — an ex-Politico editor and former editor-in-chief of the Washingtonian magazine — of the FBI that’s “existed” since the death of its first director, J. Edgar Hoover, in 1972.

“And we are arguing right now over the wreckage of what it might be when it is rebuilt at some point in the future.”

Graff, earlier in the CNN appearance, called the moves at the CIA “as shocking as any development that we are living through right now” and flagged the “inconsistency of the logical consistency” of the administration’s announcements.

“You could imagine that on the same night that you’re announcing that the U.S. might take over Gaza you would not want to gut the intelligence agencies that help us understand that part of the world and mitigate risks to the United States, here and abroad,” Graff noted.

He continued, “On the same day that you are also looking at neutering the FBI’s entire counterterrorism program here at the homeland that, for instance, some of these decisions in one category might have downside risks in another.”

Collins, who noted that over 20,000 federal workers have taken buyouts, asked what it would look like if the “entire” CIA agreed to such offers.

Graff said it would spell trouble for the U.S. as the Trump administration’s goal is understood to be about “chaos” and “wreckage,” adding that he doesn’t think there’s a “grand plan” beyond the buyouts.

“It’s certainly not a cost-cutting measure to throw away decades of experience and millions of dollars in training that we have invested in these workforces,” he said.