#washington-field-office

Trump's FBI Removed Two of Its Senior Counterterrorism Leaders — the Head of Counterterrorism at the Washington Field Office and His Deputy — Not for Failing to Stop a Threat, but for Declining to Keep Investigating Allegedly Harassing Phone Calls to Katie Miller, the Podcaster Wife of Top White House Adviser Stephen Miller, After Agents Judged the Calls Did Not Warrant It

In September 2026, the FBI under Kash Patel ousted two of its senior counterterrorism officials — Michael Burgwald, the special agent in charge of counterterrorism at the Washington Field Office, and his deputy, Courtland Rae — after their team determined that allegedly harassing phone calls received by Katie Miller did not warrant further investigation. Katie Miller is a conservative podcaster and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful advisers in the Trump White House. The agents' professional assessment — that the calls were not the kind of threat that merited a continued federal investigation — reportedly angered FBI leadership, and the two men were removed from their posts. (Burgwald already had a strained relationship with Patel; a senior executive overseeing the D.C. office confirmed the ousting but denied the order came from Patel personally.) Strip the names out and the principle is alarming: FBI leaders were punished not for a failure of security but for exercising independent judgment in a matter touching a politically connected family. It is the inverse of how a professional law-enforcement agency is supposed to work. The message to every agent is that the correct amount of investigation is however much the connected complainant wants — and that declining, on the merits, is a career-ending mistake when the complainant is close to power.

Days Before Trump Launched His War on Iran, Kash Patel Gutted the FBI Unit That Tracks Iranian Threats and Espionage — Firing About a Dozen Counterintelligence Staffers From CI-12, Not for Any Failure on the Job, but Because They Had Once Been Assigned to the Mar-a-Lago Classified-Documents Investigation of Trump — Draining Decades of Iran Expertise at the Exact Moment the Country Was About to Need It Most

In early March 2026, FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the firing of about a dozen counterintelligence staffers from CI-12, a unit in the FBI's Washington Field Office whose work focused on media leaks, global espionage, and threats involving the Iranian regime. According to CNN and other reporting, they were not removed for poor performance. They were removed because they had, in some capacity, previously been assigned to the Justice Department's investigation — conducted under the Biden-era special counsel Jack Smith — into Trump's retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago; Patel reportedly lashed out after learning Smith had sought his own phone records. The timing made the purge far worse than a routine act of political revenge: it came just days before the United States launched a major bombing campaign against Iran. Patel gutted the FBI's Iran counterintelligence expertise at the precise moment a war with Iran was about to make that expertise critical — hollowing out the team responsible for tracking Iranian espionage and retaliation inside the United States right as both became acutely likely. Members of Congress demanded Patel testify; the FBI disputed that the firings damaged its Iran work. But the sequence is the indictment: the director punished agents for having investigated Trump, and in doing so, left the country blinder to Iran on the eve of fighting it.