The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

Maybe gutting the FBI wasn't such a great idea

Author

mister mix
September 12, 2025

As I write this, the person who killed Charlie Kirk is still on the lam. The hunting rifle that was used was stashed near the campus and recovered, accompanied by a very questionable allegation that the cartridges in the rifle had “trans ideology” on them. We’re seeing new images of the shooter, a young white male, that show mainly that he was very aware of the location of surveillance cameras and didn’t show much of his face.

This brings us to the completely reasonable question: what the fuck is going on with the FBI? Apparently it’s gone through a purge of anyone who isn’t loyal enough to Trump. Idiot Kash Patel named two possible suspects who were later released. Josh Marshall has a good piece on this:

We’ve been seeing over the last eight months what amounts to the dismantlement of the FBI. It was fitting that the details of this lawsuit came out yesterday, the same day as the Kirk shooting, which showed in much more graphic detail just how bad it’s been. The top echelon of the organization has effectively been purged based on totally arbitrary grounds tied to anything that could be deemed offensive personally to Donald Trump. The former top official in the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office, which is heading up the investigation into Kirk’s death, was recently fired, per Reuters. So we have the question: what’s the impact of all this? Does it show up in how the organization does its work? Or is it resilient enough to absorb these blows and fall back on several decades of post-Hoover professionalization?

The verdict of the last 24 hours is pretty bad. You have Patel personally screwing up news about a potential suspect in custody, the kind of thing that might be a career-killer for any other agent in normal times. We’re so rightly shocked by the murder itself and so accustomed to the daily cavalcade of Trump administration nonsense that we’re inured to just how crazy a goof this was. When the Bureau first posted pictures of the new person of interest, I’m told, the email to contact with information was broken. No single goof tells us the state of the Bureau, but everything that has happened over the last 24 hours suggests the FBI is wrecked about as badly as you’d have imagined. The lawsuit fleshes out the backstory — the last 24 hours illustrates the results. We’re likely to see many more examples.

This all points to the major issue with Trump’s “management style” — it’s a set of courtiers whose main goal is to get the attention and approval of their god king. He micromanages, expects each of his court members to accomplish multiple roles, and values loyalty above results. It also points to the role of Stephen Miller and the immigrant haters, who have reassigned half of federal law enforcement to ICE.

These are all great issues for Democrats to raise. If MAGA wants to treat Charlie Kirk like the most important, biggest martyr to ever live, it’s reasonable to ask why a 2025 investigation is going forward like the investigation that followed JFK’s assassination, which was a total botch job. Also, when / if they finally catch the guy, how the hell can we be sure that they caught the right one?

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