Two veteran Washington, DC, FBI agents have been reassigned over their handling of a probe involving threats made to conservative podcaster Katie Miller, the wife of senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, CNN claimed in a report late Saturday.
Sourcing “two people familiar with the move,” the network reported that Michael Burgwald, the special agent in charge of counterterrorism matters at the bureau’s D.C. field office, and his deputy, Courtland Rae, “were ousted from their positions by bureau leadership after investigators determined that allegedly harassing phone calls Katie Miller received from unknown individuals did not warrant further investigation.”
According to CNN:
The field office team that reviewed the reported harassing calls determined they did not meet the threshold required for an FBI investigation, and no nexus to terrorism was identified, the sources said. This decision did not sit well with bureau leadership, and the two senior field office agents were removed from their positions, according to the sources.
The CNN report intimated the move could have been generated by FBI director Kash Patel, who it called “a fierce loyalist of President Donald Trump,” writing he has “fired, demoted, or forced into retirement countless career employees who handled past investigations into Trump and his allies.”
Those moves have resulted in lawsuits, the cable news network reported.
Bloomberg Law also reported the reassignment, and the FBI specifically called out writer Ben Penn on what it called “FAKE News.”
In a post on the official FBI’s Rapid Response X account, leading with the words “Dear FAKE News…,” Darren Cox, senior executive for the D.C. Field Office, said in a statement:
Director Patel did not order this decision. This was a personnel decision made at the Washington field office level alone based on our constant evaluation of mission needs. Any suggestion otherwise is false.
