Exclusive: Justice Department Erases Domestic Terror Unit

FBI unit is also drained of personnel while domestic threat level has risen to “red,” former senior DOJ lawyer tells SpyTalk in an exclusive interview. "So now we have no data," he says.

Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the unit in a “death by a thouand cuts,” says Thomas Brzozowski. We were running into a system where the justice system seemed to start to weaponize its own mechanisms against the very people who we were sworn to protect…It’s created a culture of fear.”

A top official in the Justice Department unit assigned to combat domestic terrorism  has resigned in frustration after watching his office effectively gutted with much of its funding cut off and its lawyers reassigned to immigration enforcement and other matters. 

“I no longer had a functioning job. There was nothing for me to do anymore,” said Thomas Brzozowski, who had served as the unit’s senior counsel for the last 10 years, in an exclusive interview on the SpyTalk podcast scheduled for posting on Friday.  “And so I couldn’t in good conscience continue to hold myself out as counsel for domestic terrorism when it became evidence to me that this was simply not going to be something that I would be permitted to work on.”

The net result, according to Brzozowski: “There has been a clear retreat by the federal government in its fight against violent extremism.” 

The resignation of Brzozowski, which has not been previously reported, is the latest sign of turmoil and disruption in the upper ranks of U.S. law enforcement under Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

His departure comes while the FBI—whose own domestic terror unit has been similarly drained—is still reeling over the firing of multiple senior executives and agents, including former acting director Brian Driscoll, apparently over a perception they were not sufficiently loyal to President Trump’s agenda. 

It also comes at a time there has been a marked uptick in domestic terror attacks and plots, much of them from so-called “lone wolves,” including the 2024 assassination of United Healthcare’s CEO, the recent slaying of two Israeli Embassy employees at a Jewish museum in Washington, and last week’s mass shooting at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta by a gunman apparently angry over Covid vaccines. Brzozowski characterized the current threat level as “red,” not out of concern over any particular terror group but because of the increasing propensity for disgruntled Americans to act on their personal grievances.

Brzozowski said that the dismantling of his unit, which has since disappeared from the department’s organization chart, was not the result of a single decision to shut the office down or an orchestrated purge from the very top. 

Instead, the unit —consisting of about nine lawyers with a small support staff—has quietly been sidelined with most of its staff leaving or getting reassigned over the past seven months as it became increasingly clear their work was not a top administration priority.

Tom Brzozowski: The current threat level is “red.” (Fisicales.gob.ar photo)

“It was death by a thousand cuts, if you will, more of an attrition,” said Brzozowski.  “When the administration came in, the attorneys that were assigned to the domestic terrorism unit had a caseload, all of which concerned domestic terrorism cases. Within the span of several months, and it accelerated towards my departure, those attorneys began to receive cases that had nothing to do with domestic terrorism as part of their workload.” 

This story draws from an interview conducted on Thursday, Aug. 14, by Jeff Stein, Michael Isikoff and Karen J. Greenberg, to be aired in full on Friday’s SpyTalk podcast. This story was written by Mr. Isikoff.

During this same period, dozens of FBI agents were also reassigned from the bureau’s Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, he said.

“Initially, there was this feeling, well, we can hold the line and we'll just stay put and kind of weather the storm,” Brzozowski said in the SpyTalk podcast about the attitude among many career employees at the Justice Department. 

“But it became clear that when you get the leadership being pushed out and dissenting voices being silenced, or dissenting voices being perceived as disloyalty—even worse—you’ve got a scenario where compliance is rewarded over curiosity. And not to overstate it, but it became kind of clear to me that we were running into a system where the justice system seemed to start to weaponize its own mechanisms against the very people who we were sworn to protect, which is a dangerous spot to be in. And I don't say that lightly. It’s created a culture of fear.” 

The Justice Department public affairs office did not respond to a request for comment.

The practical impacts of the gutting of the domestic terror unit may not be immediately clear. Ongoing cases will still be pursued and prosecuted by line assistant U.S. attorneys in the field, Brzozowski said.  

But the long-term impact will be severe, he said. Domestic terror cases are often especially complex because of First Amendment concerns, often making it difficult to monitor or investigate U.S.-based actors who may be expressing fringe or extremist views on social media platforms before actually participating in violent attacks.  

Expertise Erased

What is lost with the dismantling of the unit, however, is the years of experience that Brzozowski and his erstwhile colleagues had in navigating such issues. “I looked around and I saw career prosecutors, agents that I've worked with for years, people who have vast expertise in counterterrorism, they're being pushed aside, reassigned.”

“Now, my fear is that that understanding is no longer in place,” he said. 

And with funding for his old unit all but cut off, Brzozowski said, another of its major functions — to assemble and disseminate crucial data on the extent of the problem— has been lost as well. 

“The ability to aggregate any data associated with what we're doing in the context of domestic terrorism, number of domestic terrorism investigations, number of domestic terrorism prosecutions, that's all gone. So now we have no data. We can't allocate resources appropriately with no data. We can't speak to the issue or the threat itself.”