Days before Donald Trump launched an illegal military campaign in Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel gutted the elite counterintelligence unit responsible for monitoring threats from Iran and its proxies.
Patel terminated a dozen employees from a group known as CI-12, accusing them—without providing evidence—of improperly investigating Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The timing couldn’t be worse: days later, the U.S. toppled Iran’s regime and sparked a sprawling regional conflict.
The firings make a twisted kind of sense when you look at what CI-12 actually does. The unit is charged with investigating media leaks and mishandled classified documents—and the documents found at Trump’s Florida estate reportedly included U.S. military plans for Iran.
So Patel fired the people who investigated Trump for holding onto Iran war plans, right before Trump started an Iran war.
The gutting of CI-12 is just one piece of a larger pattern. Nearly half of all working FBI agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement, including those working in counterterrorism. The DOJ’s National Security Division—including the counterterrorism office—has already lost at least half of its workforce, according to CNN.
Meanwhile, Trump admitted to Congress on Monday that he has no actual plan for the war. In a letter regarding the War Powers Resolution, he wrote that “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary.”
Translation: no idea how long this will last or whether ground troops will be needed.
The administration’s rationale keeps shifting. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed Monday that they knew Israel was going to strike and “we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.” Trump has claimed the threat from Iran was imminent, but experts say he’s exaggerating.
Six U.S. service members have already died in the conflict. More than 700 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children—dozens of whom were at a girls’ school.
Even Trump’s own former spokesperson, Caroline Sunshine, is calling him out. “I voted for President Trump, and I worked for President Trump because I didn’t want to hear statements like that from my government again regarding American involvement in the Middle East,” she said on Fox News.
And in an ominous Truth Social post Monday night, Trump suggested the war could stretch into eternity: “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies.”