A person who has been affiliated with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a former aide to one of the FBI’s toughest congressional critics are working as advisers to the bureau’s director, four current and former FBI officials told NBC News.
The two are among at least four people who have been brought into the FBI to advise its director, the current and former officials said. At least two of the new advisers are retired FBI agents, one of whom, Tom Ferguson, was an aide to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a staunch Trump ally and vocal FBI critic.
The arrival of the person who has been affiliated with Space X has not been previously reported. NBC News has not confirmed the person’s name. A spokesperson for SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s not clear who facilitated the arrival of the new advisers or what areas they are focusing on. A spokesperson for Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick for FBI director, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did the FBI. Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing is Thursday.
Former FBI officials said the new advisers have sparked concerns that people with ties to partisan political figures will be helping run the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency. While some FBI officials briefed on the arrangement are hopeful that it could result in needed reforms, others fear a compromise of the bureau’s decades-old tradition of distancing itself from politics.
Unlike the Justice Department, the FBI has no political appointees other than its director, whom the president picks for what is supposed to be a 10-year term. Much as is the case at the CIA, nearly everyone else who works at the FBI is a career civil servant.
That structure was created after the death in 1972 of longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had agents meddle in politics for decades, covertly surveilling and smearing political leaders and groups — from the far-right John Birch Society to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Rob D’Amico, a former FBI agent who served on the bureau’s hostage rescue team and in Afghanistan, said he has been told the outsiders are there to advise the FBI on how to reform itself, including sending headquarters employees out into the field.
“That’s absolutely needed,” he said. “Things have gotten too headquarters-centric, and when headquarters is in D.C., the natural thing that happens in D.C. is that things get political.”
However, D’Amico said, it is not normal to have people with ties to partisan political figures on the seventh floor, as FBI employees call the director’s office.
“This will have to be done very carefully,” D’Amico said. “How does that chain of command work? You have to be very careful that it doesn’t become like the Russian political officer on a Russian nuclear sub, enforcing party discipline.”
New advisers to FBI director
Gregory Mentzer, another former FBI agent, is working in the FBI director’s office, according to his LinkedIn profile. Mentzer, who retired as an FBI agent in 2018 and had been working as contract firearms instructor at the FBI Academy, lists his affiliation as simply “Director’s Office, FBI.” Mentzer did not respond to a message sent via LinkedIn.
Ferguson, the retired FBI agent and former aide to Jordan, lists himself as “Senior Policy Advisor, Director’s Advisory Team,” on his LinkedIn profile. Asked by NBC News via LinkedIn about his role at the FBI, Ferguson replied that he was “just going back home to help.”
Ferguson said in a LinkedIn post that he was leaving his position at the House Judiciary Committee to serve “in the new administration.” He called his work there the “honor of a lifetime” and added, “equally awesome was the chance to work with and for Jim Jordan, a legend from my great home state of OH.”
Ferguson referred questions to a spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee, who declined to comment. CNN previously reported Ferguson’s hiring.
Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has regularly accused the FBI, without citing specific evidence, of being a corrupt tool of the Biden administration. He claimed the FBI helped suppress a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop computer and retaliated against whistleblowers.
Jordan says the FBI has engaged in politically motivated investigations of Trump, singling out former Director James Comey and his top aides for criticism.
Jordan is also a vocal supporter of Trump’s nominee, Patel, who has called the FBI “one of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State,” a reference to partisan claims that career government officials have secretly plotted to undermine Trump.
Ferguson has waded forcefully into some of the country’s most divisive culture war issues in posts on LinkedIn, including debates over race and gender.
“The overwhelming majority of Americans, my family included, are tired of having the false narrative of ‘systemic racism’ forced down our throats,” Ferguson wrote in a 2021 post criticizing Disney for its “woke” posture.
According to news reports and social media posts, Ferguson was involved in school board protests in Fairfax County, Virginia, some of which received national coverage.
In 2022, he spoke to Fox News at a protest about his objections to changes to sex-ed policies, saying he found it “very inappropriate” for schools to “tackle these politically charged, very dynamic, sort of social hot buttons at such a young age.”
Jordan has also spread exaggerated claims about a Justice Department memo that was meant to allow the FBI to assist school districts with threats, some falsely stating that federal authorities were making parents out to be domestic terrorists.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump named to the position in 2017, said the bureau had “never been in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings or anywhere else, and we never will be.”
The FBI is being led by a Trump-appointed acting director — a career bureau employee who runs its office in Newark, New Jersey — while it awaits a confirmation vote on Patel. Wray recently resigned after Trump made it clear he would replace him.
Concern among former officials
Former FBI officials told NBC News there is a need for the bureau to reform and modernize, particularly in the digital age as cyberthreats from China and other rivals grow.
A former top FBI official, who requested anonymity so he could speak candidly, said the claims that the bureau was politicized were exaggerated.
“I get the counternarrative: ‘The place is so messed up, it’s so politicized, we need to turn it upside down and fix everything,’” he said. “But give me an example of where the organization has gone wrong. … Where is the evidence? It’s a solution in search of a problem.”
A second former FBI official who asked not to be named, citing fears of retaliation, said modernization is needed at the bureau but expressed concern about political loyalty tests.
“There is a difference between reforms that make the bureau more effective and efficient,” he said, “versus infusing a one-sided ideology and purging the people who don’t share that viewpoint.”
Frank Figliuzzi, an NBC News contributor who retired as head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division after a lengthy career in many senior positions, said the arrangement was problematic on its face.
“We should all support any attempt to make healthy reforms at the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency,” Figliuzzi said, but he warned, “There is a serious perception that this is far more about politics than it is enforcing our nations laws.”
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