What Do You Do If Hundreds of FBI and Justice Department Employees Are Following Orders to Commit Crimes?

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The strategy was spelled out in advance. First, push out everyone you can. Then institute loyalty tests for the people who remain. Ask those remaining to do unlawful things, so that the only ones who stay have partisan loyalty and are complicit in unlawful conduct. Project 2025 called for a president to make “aggressive use” of executive power “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will,” and for one who could “handcuff the bureaucracy” and bring “the Administrative State to heel.” What was a proposal in 2024 is now the staffing orders for the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Let’s first look at the purges. To carry it out, Project 2025 recommended a mechanism called Schedule F, which strips career civil servants of their job protections and lets a president fire them for any reason, exposing as many as fifty thousand positions. The Civil Rights Division, the office that enforces voting rights and prosecutes officials who break the law, employed about three hundred sixty-five attorneys in January 2025 and about one hundred five after an April deadline. Seven in ten had left. Seventeen inspectors general were fired in the administration’s first week, those were the watchdogs in charge of auditing agencies for fraud and abuse.

Now let's look at the loyalty test. On her first day, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo demanding that government lawyers zealously advance and defend the administration's interests, with almost no room for dissent. The people who would not work that way said so when they resigned. Two hundred eighty-two Justice Department alumni signed a public letter stating that they had carried out their duties faithfully regardless of who held the White House, until they no longer could. The departures kept coming, and by late April 2026 roughly fifty-five hundred people had left the department, with prosecutors describing colleagues who refused vindictive cases and were fired for it.

The people now staffing the federal criminal justice apparatus have acted at the behest of the regime.

The Department missed the December 19, 2025 deadline the Epstein Files Transparency Act set for releasing its files, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche admitting before the deadline that it would not comply, then withheld or redacted roughly two hundred thousand pages and released much that was already public, prompting an audit by the Justice Department's inspector general. That same Justice Department has brought political prosecutions against Letitia James and James Comey through Lindsey Halligan, a former White House aide with no prosecutorial experience, who presented each case to the grand jury alone, and a federal judge dismissed both indictments after ruling her appointment unconstitutional. The department has also subpoenaed Wall Street Journal reporters’ records after rescinding the policy that had protected journalists.

So here is the serious problem, the one that makes this more than a bad year an election can fix. Suppose we win everything anyway. That presupposition means handwaving the reality that the next federal elections will be neither free nor fair, along with the methods of interference already in full deployment in Republican states and being pushed elsewhere. Say we move past all that. Say Democrats sweep it all. How do you undo the capture of these agencies? Do you fire everyone at the Justice Department and the FBI in a single day, and watch the agencies stop functioning? Do you rehire the thousands forced out, who have moved on, and then fire the ones who stayed? Do you investigate everyone who remained, each of whom will say they were doing their job? Do you build a new body to investigate the old one? That takes years. It takes funding. It takes Congress. It can be obstructed at every step. And the next president inherits all of it at once: a federal debt on track to pass its World War II record this decade and deficits the Congressional Budget Office calls large by historical standards, dozens of emergencies demanding attention, and a government stripped of the resources that would normally handle them.

Rebuilding the Justice Department and the FBI competes against all of that.

There is a path that does not require winning a rigged national game.

You make things right at the most local level you have available.

The states have their own criminal authority, and it does not depend on the federal government. Under dual sovereignty, a state enforces its own criminal law on conduct within its borders, and it does not need federal cooperation to do it. A state attorney general or a county district attorney can investigate and charge federal officials who violated that state's law, on their own authority. A governor can order state law enforcement to investigate, refer cases for prosecution, and direct resources to the effort.

One objection you will hear is that federal officials and officers are protected. They are not protected for criminal activity. The Supremacy Clause shields a federal officer from state prosecution only for acts they were authorized to perform and that were necessary and proper to their federal duties. Obstruction is not a federal duty. Lying under oath is not necessary and proper. Withholding evidence to protect politicians and their friends is not authorized by any law. Conduct that fails that test has never been protected, and the Supreme Court has said as much since 1890. Qualified immunity does not reach these cases either. It is a defense to civil lawsuits for damages, and it has no role in a criminal prosecution at all.

These two doctrines have expanded beyond their original purpose, into a general presumption that the people who work for the federal government cannot be prosecuted under any other law. No law requires that deference. It has gone unused only because we were accustomed to a federal government that prosecuted its own. We let corruption by officials go unprosecuted for years while an ordinary person is charged for smaller offenses. Nothing in the law or constitution renders state corruption statutes inapplicable to federal officials. We have to bring the cases if we want to move the courts, it’s the same strategy the right has effectively deployed for decades.

Investigations are routine. Prosecutors open them every day against ordinary people for far less than what is documented here. State and county prosecutors can open investigations into the fraud and coverups and blatant criminality you see daily and they can do all of it using constitutional authority they already have.

Fortunately, the state response doesn’t i the federal government being restored but it helps pursue justice where we have the power to do so. It also makes it clear to bad actors that we will seek every lawful and ethical path to restore justice in this nation.

Those officials work for us, and most of them are elected. You can find your state attorney general at naag.org. Find your county district attorney through your county or district attorney’s office, listed on your county government website. You can call or email both and ask them to examine the publicly released Epstein files for conduct that violates this state’s criminal law, to investigate where it does, and to forward anything bearing on other states to those states’ prosecutors.

This is what we want, justice rather than excuses. Make sure to tell them why it matters to you and a little about yourself, make it clear we want criminal investigations rather than just civil suits.

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