Reforming the FBI is one of the most pressing national security priorities for the second Trump administration. Just how much FBI root-and-branch reform is urgently required has been revealed by troubling news from bureau headquarters.
Although President Donald Trump is promising to clean the FBI of its woke misadventures, woke business continues as usual at the bureau. Intelligence community sources with direct knowledge tell me that a senior agent who kneeled while on duty at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Washington, D.C., has been promoted to one of the FBI’s most prized jobs. They say that Sarah Linden is a new deputy assistant director out of the FBI headquarters. There, Linden has been placed in charge of Russian counterintelligence in the national security branch. In other words, Linden is now the top U.S. counterspy against the Kremlin. The FBI declined to comment.
It’s now evident that FBI leadership is infested with left-wing politics, including trendy wokeness involving race and sexuality. Here, Mike Waller’s book-length expose Big Intel is an indispensable, if depressing, read. Over the last couple of decades, the FBI has embraced left-wing politics as a de facto requirement for promotion to its top ranks. That explains the bureau’s missteps, such as treating traditional Catholics as an extremist threat. The FBI has a problem with high-level corruption, too, as demonstrated by the embarrassing case of Charles McGonigal, the senior counterintelligence official who took ample cash from Kremlin oligarchs and Albanian gangsters, a sordid scandal that the bureau hushed up. Yet the FBI’s political problems are equally serious.
Kash Patel, assuming he gets Senate confirmation as the new FBI director, faces a long to-do list as the bureau’s soon-to-be new boss.
Still, there’s no more vivid depiction of the “new” FBI’s politics and priorities than how serving agents wearing FBI garb in June 2020 knelt before BLM protesters in Washington, who were marching to commemorate George Floyd. Old-school FBI types were appalled by this spectacle, with serving agents “taking a knee” in honor of BLM, an avowedly political organization, at the same time the bureau was treating right-wingers as enemies of the state.
Nevertheless, FBI leadership chose to reward, not punish, the kneelers. Several of the kneelers have seen their careers prosper because, not in spite, of their pro-BLM demonstration. In 2023, Congress asked questions about those agents, including Linden, who stood out in photos since she didn’t appear to meet the bureau’s physical fitness guidelines.
After the protest, Linden was promoted to assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s powerful Washington Field Office, which the bureau highlighted on social media. She headed that office’s Criminal and Cyber Division. Congressional questions about the BLM kneeling didn’t slow Linden’s advancement — rather the opposite.
Linden’s new appointment is to a big and very prestigious job. But it’s also a very important job. Russian intelligence officers have had relative freedom of action in the United States in recent years as counterintelligence resources have shifted toward China-related threats. Though, like most of the intelligence community, the FBI hasn’t been able to follow the evidence. Russian intelligence activity on U.S. soil has included suspected microwave energy attacks on U.S. personnel related to the so-called Havana syndrome concern.
Counterintelligence insiders tell me that Linden’s qualifications for her powerful new position are modest. Moreover, given the embarrassing hash that a politicized FBI made during Trump’s first term with the Russia espionage issue, skewing dubious counterintelligence claims to smear the White House, why on earth has the FBI placed an apparent left-wing activist in charge of this extremely sensitive national security mission?
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This column has strongly advocated taking the national security portfolio away from the FBI and spinning it off in a new, stand-alone domestic intelligence agency without law enforcement powers. The bureau, as it has become, simply cannot be trusted with that degree of responsibility over counterintelligence, including arrest powers.
If Linden is heading the bureau’s Russia counterintelligence mission, that speaks volumes about the state of the FBI. The Trump White House should have questions about what’s going on inside its own executive branch, as should Congress. Someone hasn’t got the memo. Or if they have, they appear to have ignored it.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.