THE PURGE
Trump touts political firings and retribution as he begins a government overhaul in his image
Jeremy Herb, Hannah Rabinowitz and Evan Perez, CNN
Tue, January 21, 2025 at 3:06 PM MST
8 min read
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US President Donald Trump delivers his inaugural address after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States in the Rotunda of the US Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump takes office for his second non-consecutive term as the 47th president of the United States.
President Donald Trump’s political retribution tour began this week with firings of his perceived enemies inside the federal government, the targeting of former intelligence and national security officials and a directive to investigate actions by the Biden administration.
Trump and his team wasted little time reassigning nearly two dozen senior Justice Department officials and dismissing career DOJ officials who oversee the nation’s immigration courts, State Department diplomats and the commandant of the Coast Guard.
Trump also pulled the Secret Service detail for his former national security adviser, John Bolton, and the security clearances for 51 people who spoke out during the 2020 Hunter Biden investigation.
The actions are all part of an initial wave of Trump’s efforts to remove the so-called “deep state” from the federal government, as he and his team have pledged to ensure those working inside the government are loyal to the president. Trump has long complained that he was undermined by anti-Trump officials across the federal workforce in his first administration, particularly from the Justice Department and the intelligence community.
Some of the turnover between administrations, especially with a different political party taking charge, is perfectly normal. Presidents typically replace US attorneys across the country, for instance.
But Trump has also made a show of the firings he’s carried out, taking to his social media to boast about removing more than 1,000 Biden administration political appointees – and to announce the removal of four individuals from presidential advisory boards, including prominent critics such as former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley and José Andrés, the celebrity chef and restaurateur.
“Our first day in the White House is not over yet! My Presidential Personnel Office is actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again,” Trump wrote in a 12:28 a.m. Truth Social post Tuesday.
Trump’s first wave of executive actions targeted the federal workforce broadly by making it easier to fire government employees – though his executive order is already being challenged in court.
Along with the firings of federal workers, Trump took other actions to go after his perceived enemies from outside the government.
Two of Trump’s executive orders directed the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to open broad investigations into Biden administration “censorship of free speech” or “weaponization” of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Former President Joe Biden issued a wave of pardons in the final hours of his presidency to former House January 6 Committee members and members of his family, which he said were intended to prevent Trump from launching politically motivated investigations.
Another of Trump’s executive orders revoked the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter arguing that emails from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden carried “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That executive order also revoked the security clearance of Bolton, who left the White House in November 2019 after serving as Trump’s national security adviser and has since become a Trump critic. In addition, Trump terminated the Secret Service detail that was assigned to Bolton within hours of taking office, Bolton confirmed to CNN Tuesday.
Bolton has required ongoing Secret Service protection after he left government because of threats against him from Iran. Trump initially terminated his protection after he left his administration in the first term, but Biden had restored it.
In his inaugural address, Trump claimed he would end the weaponization of the justice system: “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents – something I know something about.”
“We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again,” Trump said.
But in a more free-wheeling address to supporters inside the US Capitol Visitor Center that followed Monday, the president complained about Biden’s pardons while claiming again that his critics, including former January 6 Committee member Liz Cheney, had broken the law.
More dismissals could be coming, too. A memo from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management to the acting heads of the federal agencies directed them to assess their employees who have been hired in the last year – while reminding them that those workers can be fired more easily.
“Generally, employees in the competitive service with less than one year of service, and in the excepted service with less than two years of service, can be terminated without triggering MSPB appeal rights,” said the memo, obtained by CNN, referring to the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Early moves at DOJ and FBI
Many of the high-profile dismissals on Day 1 of the second Trump presidency came from inside law enforcement.
New acting leaders at the Justice Department moved quickly to shuffle at least 20 career officials, according to sources. Those include senior lawyers in the national security division, which in the past has been insulated from shifting political winds, and international affairs, which works on extraditions and immigration matters, the sources said.
Paul Abbate, the deputy FBI director, announced Monday morning he was retiring effective immediately. Abbate was already at the FBI’s mandatory retirement age, but former Director Chris Wray – who himself had resigned this month after Trump had vowed to fire him years before his term ended – gave Abbate an extension to continue working through April to ensure a smooth transition.
There’s now a leadership vacuum atop the FBI. Senior FBI special agent Brian Driscoll, the special agent in charge of the Newark Field Office, was named acting director on Monday. The Trump administration has promised to overhaul the FBI, starting with appointing ally Kash Patel as director. Trump’s team has also weighed plans to install a political appointee into the deputy director position, which traditionally has been a career FBI agent, CNN has previously reported.
The director of the Bureau of Prisons, Colette Peters, “separated” from the bureau Monday, the BOP said in a statement. She had served in the position for two and a half years and faced extreme difficulty with staffing shortages and institutions in disrepair. Deputy Director William Lathrop is now acting director.
Both the chief judge and the general counsel of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the nation’s immigration court system, were also asked to leave Monday. Their positions are now listed as vacant on the Justice Department website.
And the acting US attorney in Washington DC, Bridget Fitzpatrick, was also relieved of her position atop the office Monday. Fitzpatrick will stay at the US attorney’s office, but is being replaced as the top official by Ed Martin, a hardline, socially conservative activist and commentator.
Martin was an organizer with the “Stop the Steal” movement and was involved in the financing of the January 6 rally on the Ellipse that occurred directly before the attack on the Capitol. He has also publicly advocated for a national abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest and has raised imposing criminal penalties on women and doctors involved in abortions.
Some prosecutors involved in January 6 cases said that Martin’s temporary appointment was demoralizing, with one calling it a “thumb in the eye.”
Inside the Justice Department, some career officials worried that their jobs may also be at risk. One official told CNN that they were working from home Tuesday because they were “keeping their head down” and “trying to stay employed.”
“I guess I am the only one who didn’t get pardoned,” another joked.
Other officials expressed concerns that they didn’t know who was coming in to run the criminal, civil, national security, and civil rights offices at the Justice Department on an acting basis, describing to CNN that they felt “in the dark” about temporary leadership.
Still, several DOJ employees said they were optimistic about Trump’s pick for attorney general Pam Bondi officially starting the job once confirmed by the Senate. Bondi’s history as Florida attorney general gave them hope for a steady leader, officials said.
Dismissals in Coast Guard and State Department
One of the most high-profile departures this week came from inside the military, where the commandant of the US Coast Guard, Adm. Linda Fagan, was removed from her position over “failure to address border security threats” and “excessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies,” a Department of Homeland Security official confirmed to CNN on Tuesday.
At the State Department, where newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio was sworn in Tuesday, more than a dozen career officials serving in senior roles were asked to step down from their roles, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Many received the request prior to Monday’s inauguration. They had been serving in top posts for both management and policy as well as assistant secretaries of state, the sources said, and some were among the senior-most diplomats at the State Department.
Although it is typical for an incoming administration to appoint its own officials to senior roles, current career officials often stay while the appointees await Senate confirmation. Moreover, the scope and speed has raised alarm bells.
This is “almost certainly the first step toward a major purge and takeover of the career foreign service,” a former senior diplomat said.
Speaking to State Department staff on Tuesday, Rubio there would be “changes” at the State Department, but that they are not meant to be “punitive” or “destructive.”
“The changes will be because we need to be a 21st century agency that can move by – a cliche that’s used by many – at the speed of relevance,” Rubio said.
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, Natasha Bertrand, Kaitlan Collins, Jennifer Hansler, Katie Bo Lillis, Tami Luhby, Rene Marsh and Michael Williams contributed to this report.
Kaitlan Collins, CNN
Tue, January 21, 2025
Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump terminated the Secret Service detail that was assigned to his former national security adviser John Bolton, Bolton confirmed to CNN on Tuesday.
Bolton, who left the Trump White House in November 2019, has required ongoing US Secret Service protection because of threats against him from Iran. Trump initially terminated his protection after he left his administration in the first term, but President Joe Biden restored it once he took office.
“I am disappointed but not surprised that President Trump has made this decision,” Bolton said in a statement to CNN. “Notwithstanding my criticisms of President Biden’s national-security policies, he nonetheless made the decision to once again extend Secret Service protection to me in 2021.”
“The Justice Department filed criminal charges against an Iranian Revolutionary Guard official in 2022 for attempting to hire a hit man to target me. That threat remains today, as also demonstrated by the recent arrest of someone trying to arrange for President Trump’s own assassination. The American people can judge for themselves which President made the right call.”
Bolton, who served in senior national security positions in the Bush administration, has long been known for his hawkish position against Iran. He strongly opposed the 2015 nuclear deal that placed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from US sanctions, and he called on Trump to withdraw from the deal after he took office.
Trump withdrew the US from the deal in May 2018, about a month after Bolton was hired as his national security adviser. Trump fired Bolton in September 2019 after saying he “strongly disagreed with many” of Bolton’s positions.
Bolton published a book in 2020 in which he claimed the president was woefully under informed on matters of foreign policy, obsessed with shaping his media legacy, and that Trump asked the leaders of Ukraine and China to help him win the 2020 election. Trump responded by threatening to jail Bolton, repeating a threat he makes routinely about people who cross him.
After Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani was assassinated on Trump’s orders in early 2020, the Justice Department said the Iranian government sought revenge against senior Trump officials who were involved in the killing, which included Bolton, even though he was not in the administration at the time of the fatal strike.
In August 2022, the Justice Department charged an Iranian national and member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, accusing them of attempting to arrange the murder of Bolton. Prosecutors said the plot against Bolton was “likely in retaliation” for Soleimani’s assassination.
On Monday, as one of his first acts in office, Trump revoked Bolton’s security clearance – one of scores of former national security officials who lost their clearances with a signature of the new president.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
CNN’s Michael Williams contributed to this report.
Donald Trump Turns on His First Term's Middle East Hawks
Matthew Petti
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton speaks on the final day of the 14th annual Texas Tribune Festival. September 7, 2024. | Bob Daemmrich/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
Conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson described former national security adviser John Bolton as a "bureaucratic tapeworm." Bolton, a notorious war hawk, spent much of the first Trump administration trying to prevent diplomacy with North Korea and Iran exactly when Trump was interested in negotiating with those countries. During a June 2019 standoff with Iran that nearly led to war, Carlson complained that Bolton "seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering."
But Bolton won't be reemerging from any bowels now, at least not for the next four years. On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order singling out Bolton for condemnation. Because Bolton's decision to publish a tell-all memoir in 2020 "created a grave risk" to national security "for monetary gain," the order says, the administration is revoking "any active or current security clearances" held by Bolton.
The next day, Trump publicly fired Brian Hook, who had been running the State Department transition team, because Hook was "not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again." During the first Trump administration, Hook helped purge the State Department of officials who were perceived as soft on Syria or insufficiently "friendly to Israel," ran an obsessive campaign to overthrow the Iranian government, and got in the way of U.S.-Iranian hostage negotiations.
The first Trump administration took a highly aggressive line on the Middle East—hiring Bolton and Hook was part of that policy—but his second administration may turn things around. Even before taking office this week, Trump helped broker an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire and hostage exchange. Although Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had earlier called for a joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign to reshape the region, the Trump administration reportedly refused to commit to bombing Iran and warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to "fuck this [ceasefire] up."
"We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end. And, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier," Trump said during his inaugural address on Monday. "I'm pleased to say that, as of yesterday, one day before I assumed office, the hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families."
Trump is not a principled dove, especially when it comes to the United States' immediate neighbors. He wants to escalate the war on drugs in Mexico into a counterterrorism campaign and has threatened even U.S. treaty allies such as Canada, Denmark, and Panama over territory. Most ominously, his new national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is every bit the hawk Bolton was.
Joel Rayburn, another hawk from the first Trump administration who has been working closely with Hook, is expected to run the State Department's Middle Eastern bureau, reports the Saudi news outlet Al Arabiya. And Trump appointed yet another first administration veteran, Morgan Ortagus, to be deputy special presidential envoy for Middle East peace, along with a cryptic statement: "Early on Morgan fought me for three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson. These things usually don't work out, but she has strong Republican support, and I'm not doing this for me, I'm doing it for them."
A big question mark looms over Trump's relationship with Iran. At his first post-inaugural rally on Monday night, Trump said that Iran was "weakened" and blamed the Iranian government for the October 2023 attacks on Israel. (Leaked documents show that Iran had given vague commitments to help Hamas in a future war with Israel, but the Iranian government seemed blindsided by the timing of the attack.) During the rally, Trump returned to an old theme: that the economic sanctions campaign of Trump's first term left Iran "broke."
The key issue is over Iran's nuclear program. Although Iran hasn't decided to build a nuclear bomb, as far as the U.S. government knows, it has accumulated the materials it needs to build one quickly. And Iranian officials have hinted that the conflict with Israel or additional U.S. pressure might force them to make that decision. Trump, like every U.S. president since George W. Bush, has threatened to attack Iran if it does go for a bomb.
"I am not looking to be enemies with Iran. I would love to get along with them, but they cannot have a nuclear weapon. You just cannot let them have a nuclear weapon," Trump told Fox News in September last year. "If they do have a nuclear weapon, Israel is gone. It will be gone."
Vice President J.D. Vance has also said that "our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran."
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told NBC last week that he "is ready to engage with a second Trump administration," though he "doubts that, even if we engage in negotiations, they are actually seeking to overthrow the Iranian government instead of resolving the issues."
The last time Trump had a chance to meet directly with the Iranian government, Bolton pushed back hard. Mark Dubowitz, head of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a highly influential figure during Trump's first term, is hoping that the new generation of "hawks in the administration could try to block a deal internally by framing it as 'humiliating' or 'embarrassing' to Trump personally," reports the Jewish Insider.
"If the [Vance and Carlson] view trumps the views of people like [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio and Waltz and [Secretary of Defense nominee Pete] Hegseth and others, then you could see there being a deal," Dubowitz told the Insider. "The deal should be avoided at all costs because all it's going to do is put Israel in a much weaker position," he warned.
Trump revokes security clearances of former officials who signed Hunter Biden laptop letter with executive action
Katie Bo Lillis, CNN
Mon, January 20, 2025 at 9:03 PM MST
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday revoking the security clearance of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter arguing that emails from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden carried “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and that of his former national security adviser John Bolton.
Many of the former officials are long retired and no longer hold active clearances — meaning that the move may have limited practical impact on their careers — but the order nevertheless suggests that Trump intends to act on threats he’s made to penalize national security and intelligence professionals whom he deems to be his enemies.
“They should be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump said of the 51 former officials who signed the letter, at a campaign rally in June.
The executive order also directs the director of national intelligence to submit a report to the White House documenting “any additional inappropriate activity that occurred within the Intelligence Community, by anyone contracted by the Intelligence Community or by anyone who held a security clearance” related to the letter, as well as any recommended disciplinary action, within 90 days.
The letter was signed by a number of top former officials from both the Obama and Bush administrations, including former director of national intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan and former acting CIA directors John McLaughlin and Michael Morell.
In the four years since the letter was written, its authors have become a key target for Republican lawmakers and Trump’s allies. GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill have made the origins of the letter a key focus point, calling up a number of signatories to testify behind closed doors and issuing several reports on the matter.
Bolton, meanwhile, has drawn Trump’s ire for a memoir about his time at the National Security Council that was deeply critical of the president and which the first Trump administration investigated for the potential inclusion of classified material. Bolton has said that the book was cleared for release after an intense pre-publication review by the US government, and the Justice Department under President Joe Biden ended the Trump-era criminal investigation into the matter.
CNN has reached out to Bolton for comment.
The executive order, titled “Holding former government officials accountable for election interference and improper disclosure of sensitive government information,” accused the letter signatories of “falsely suggest[ing]” that an initial news story about the laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign and “willfully [weaponizing] the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions.”
It accuses Bolton of publishing a memoir “rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government” that “created a grave risk that classified material was publicly exposed” and “undermined the ability of future presidents to request and obtain candid advice on matters of national security from their staff.”
The letter about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop almost immediately became a flashpoint in the partisan wrangling over the laptop itself, which contained sexually explicit videos of the former president’s son with women, as well as photos of him doing drugs in hotel rooms, many of which have since been published by right-wing media outlets.
US President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. - Jim Watson/Pool/AFPGetty Images
When the existence of the laptop and its contents first became public through reporting by the New York Post, many mainstream media outlets questioned its authenticity and social media companies moved to restrict the ability of users to share the Post’s coverage, following questions about whether it could have been part of a foreign influence campaign — a skeptical approach that was in part bolstered by concerns raised in the letter, which were not ultimately borne out.
“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails… are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the former officials wrote in 2020. “If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
Since then, the laptop and its contents have been recognized as legitimate. It played a role in the younger Biden’s prosecution on felony drug charges, with special counsel David Weiss calling questions about the laptop’s authenticity a “conspiracy theory.”
Republicans have argued that the letter was evidence of a deep-state collusion between the CIA and the Biden campaign to cover up other materials on the laptop that they believe show improper foreign business dealings by the Biden family. There was coordination between the former officials who wrote and signed onto the letter and the Biden campaign, a Republican congressional investigation has documented, and Joe Biden, then a candidate for the presidency, cited the letter during a presidential debate at the time.
But the claims that materials on the laptop prove foreign corruption have not stood up to vetting, even as the authenticity of the device and some of the embarrassing material documenting the younger Biden’s drug use and sexual activity have been confirmed by multiple press outlets.
And all 51 signatories were private citizens at the time they wrote the letter, although a handful held contracts with the CIA at the time, the Republican congressional investigation later found. At least one of those contracts was an unpaid position.
Some did not hold clearances when the letter was written or no longer maintain one; Clapper, for example, does not currently have an active clearance.
“It would be contrary to decades of national security norms to suspend the security clearances of individuals who did nothing other than, as private citizens, exercise their protected First Amendment rights,” said Mark Zaid, an attorney who represents a number of the signatories. “Such an action would be unprecedented and undeserved, especially given many of the signatories spent their entire careers serving apolitically to protect the American people.”
Zaid later said in a post on X that the letter “was properly cleared by CIA prepub review staff not to contain classified info” and the “signatories fulfilled their lawful obligations.” Zaid added, “This EO implicitly threatens CIA staff for doing their job. We’ll see what happens.”
Hunter Biden’s lawyers have said the files on his laptop were manipulated and even sued a computer repair shop owner who publicly released the material.
Biden dropped off the laptop at a Delaware repair shop in April of 2019. His lawyers said in a court filing that the shop owner admitted in his memoir that he “began accessing sensitive, private material in the data” right away, and continued to potentially tamper with the data throughout the five months before the FBI seized the device.
This story has been updated with additional details.
