FBI agents driven out under Trump assault form support network: ‘I’m still a human’

For generations they have borne the mantle of strength and authority inherited from J Edgar Hoover’s Depression-era G-men, a label supposedly affixed after the arrest of Machine Gun Kelly in 1933.

Now hardened veterans of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are projecting a different face as they seek to fight back against what many say is the systematic undermining of the bureau’s values under a drive by Donald Trump to turn it into an instrument of retribution.

Complaining that many agents – including top leaders – and intelligence analysts have been fired, driven out or forced to resign, bureau alumni have formed an FBI Support Network that seeks to meet the legal, job-searching and mental health needs of former investigators, while bolstering those who remain but chafe under the leadership of the current director, Kash Patel.

“Many FBI agents and professional staff analysts are quietly dealing with the mental health challenges that have been caused,” said Kayla Staph, a member of the network’s advisory committee, and a former FBI cyber-crime investigator. Agents had suffered “moral injuries” from being pressured to violate their own values, she added.

“As someone who worked as a special agent and carried myself as someone who is very strong, I’m still a human,” Staph told the Guardian. “We have challenges, just like everybody else, that we’re balancing life with work [to be] on top of a job that is that we need to be mentally focused for.

“That’s why one of the things we’re offering people is to connect them with mental health support, whether that’s because they’ve left and need support on the outside or they’re dealing with things on the inside.”

She said the bureau had undergone an “unprecedented assault” on its “institutional integrity and workforce” since Trump returned to office in January last year and installed Patel – a loyalist who had been a harsh FBI critic, and vowed to uproot a “deep state” culture he claimed was biased against Trump – as its director.

The network is also championing the bureau’s traditional values, and highlighting what it says has been a calculated effort at dismantlement aimed at undermining the rule of law.

Staph said up to 2,800 agents had left since January 2025, according to the bureau’s own figures – many of them leadership figures seemingly targeted on purpose. The office of personnel management has cited a lower figure of 1,100 agents departed in the first year of the administration.

“About one-third of the agents who have left were leaders in the organization,” said Staph. “They are the ones who understand the nature of the FBI core values and the people that we look to to guide us in raising up that next generation.

“It would seem that driving out so many leaders was by design, because it alleviates obstacles if someone is trying to use the FBI for their own purposes.”

The network’s members include Brian Driscoll, who briefly served as the bureau’s acting director in the weeks before Patel’s confirmation by the Senate, but was later fired after trying to protect agents targeted because of involvement in previous investigations that targeted Trump, including the January 6 insurrection.

Driscoll appears in a video announcing the network’s launch, saying its goal was “to offer our assistance to the special agents, intelligence analysts and the professional staff who are under attack”.

The video’s most poignant contribution, however, comes from Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, whose death, at 81, in March was greeted with gloating by Trump, who posted on social media that he was “glad he is dead” because of Mueller’s role, as a special counsel, in an investigation into whether Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.

“We have a unique mission, we have a unique legacy that has been passed down to us and I think people in the FBI know and understand and are tremendously proud to be part of that legacy,” Muller says in footage at the beginning of the three-and-a-half-minute video.

Staph – who resigned from her position at the bureau’s Norfolk, Virginia field office last September, citing the diversion of resources to mass deportation efforts – said the network spoke for remaining agents who are prohibited from publicly defending that legacy.

“We’re doing something that FBI personnel can’t do from the inside,” she said. “They’re apolitical, so from the outside, we can speak out against the attacks on the bureau’s dedicated work and raise awareness about the importance of its mission-critical work.”

Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State – an organization of retired national security professionals dedicated to safeguarding the rule of law – said the network’s formation was a reaction to an official drive to reshape US security services in an image resembling historically notorious agencies like the KGB, the Gestapo or the Stasi, the secret police in communist East Germany.

“The fact that former FBI people need a support group tells you the devastating impact of the president’s policies and Kash Patel’s policies,” said Cash, a former intelligence officer. “It’s an alarm bell ringing. These are people that stay on the line to the last. The fact that they need a support group tells us that American democracy itself and law enforcement needs a support group.”

But he added: “The fact that they’re organizing tells me that there’s something still powerful about the FBI, and I have confidence that the history of that organization is going to permit them to resist destruction.”