Of course Donald Trump couldn’t give a shit, eh?
He’s hated the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the jump for NOT being ‘loyal’ to him instead of the law….
So the complaints about the border wall government shutdown will fall on deaf ears in Trump’s White House….
FBI agents have lost irreplaceable sources. Joint Terrorism Task Force officers can’t get into the bureau’s computer systems. Federal investigations are being stymied by a lack of resources. The partial government shutdown, now in its 33rd day, has become a serious national-security threat, the FBI Agents Association said on Tuesday.
Over the past several weeks, the association has been compiling stories from agents about the the shutdown’s impact on the bureau’s operations. One agent, speaking anonymously, said his unit had “lost several sources who have worked for months, and years, to penetrate groups and target subjects” due to the inability to pay confidential sources. “These assets cannot be replaced,” the agent said. “Serving my country has always been a privilege, but it has never been so hard or thankless.” Another agent reported: “Not being able to pay Confidential Human Sources risks losing them and the information they provide FOREVER. It is not a switch that we can turn on and off.”
Others complained that their investigations were being slow-rolled, with dozens of grand-jury subpoenas going undelivered. “The operational impacts of this shutdown are immeasurable,” said one agent in the Northeast region. “We have postponed the indictment of subjects due to the shutdown.”
President Donald Trump, who said last month that he would take responsibility for shutting the government down if Congress refused to appropriate $5.7 billion for his border wall, proposed what he described as a compromise over the weekend. But he continued to insist on the wall. Democrats rejected the proposal immediately.
The president did not mention the more than 800,000 federal workers affected by the impasse, let alone the effects it has had on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and drug-trafficking and cybersecurity operations by the FBI—an agency for which he has little affection. In the two and a half years since the bureau launched its counterintelligence investigation into potential coordination between members of Trump’s campaign and Russia, the president has chided the FBI in dozens of tweets, rallies, and interviews. The withering morale and possibility of having to work without pay has made it difficult to recruit new agents, current and former agents have told me….