The last place Mike Rogers should be is leading the FBI

Building speculation that President-elect Donald Trump was seriously considering appointing former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) to lead the FBI was brought to an abrupt end Friday, and welcome news it was.

Rogers would have been exactly the same sort of FBI director that has led Trump and so many conservatives to distrust the agency to begin with. A former member of Congress from Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers’s most recent foray into politics was a failed Senate bid in Michigan that came even as Trump carried the state in the presidential election.

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Looking for work after losing his senate bid, Rogers attempted to position himself as an ideal candidate to replace FBI Director Christopher Wray, who Trump is widely expected to dismiss when he takes office. On the surface, Rogers has the resume for the job: he was an FBI agent before serving in Congress and led the intelligence committee. On cable news, he even attempted to portray himself as the man who could fix the problems in the FBI’s leadership.

“You think of the serious problems we have with human trafficking, 30,000 people in this country illegally who have been convicted of rape or murder,” he said. “This is where the FBI should be applying its resources. It should not be engaged in politics. The culture of the FBI on the seventh floor needs to be changed — and that has to have a kind of reckoning.”

But the warning signs of what kind of leadership Rogers would bring were always there. Rogers received praise from none other than former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who was involved in the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane operation that sought to tie Trump and his team to the Russian government before he was fired by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

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But on Friday, Dan Scavino, a close aide of the president-elect, put an end to any speculation that Rogers could be nominated to lead the FBI.

“Just spoke to President Trump regarding Mike Rogers going to the FBI,” Scavino said. “It’s not happening — In his own words, ‘I have never even given it a thought.’ Not happening.”

Anyone hoping that the election of Trump would bring about much-needed reform to the FBI breathed a sigh of relief. Despite his public statements, Rogers would not have brought the sort of cultural change that is needed at the FBI. As much as he focused on the culture among the executives leading the agency, the problems extend far beyond that. A not-insignificant number of rank-and-file agents have perpetuated the political agendas of those who lead it.

Take, for instance, the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office. In 2023, a whistleblower leaked an internal memo that identified Catholics who attend mass in Latin as a potential national security threat that should be surveilled. The memo relied on two dubious sources for its conclusions: an article from the Atlantic, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

After the memo was leaked, Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to downplay its significance, claiming it was the work of one rogue analyst. The memo, they said, had been withdrawn and that steps were being taken to ensure it did not happen again.

Were it not for the fact that it leaked publicly, any “steps” to ensure similar documents were never produced would likely have never occurred.

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Likewise, in 2022, FBI agents with rifles and bulletproof vests stormed the home of pro-life activist Mark Houck to arrest him, not for killing or threatening to kill someone, but for pushing away an abortion clinic volunteer who was harassing his son. The raid took place in the early morning and in front of Houck’s seven children.

The FBI had no reason to suspect that Houck would flee, and did not even give him the opportunity to turn himself in. Instead, they busted down the door to his home and traumatized his young children in order to make a political statement that they and the Biden administration were fighting back against anyone who opposed abortion.

While the two incidents I mentioned are hardly the only ones where the FBI has embraced political agendas in their day-to-day activities, they are instructive. Storming a residence with young children over a pushing incident or writing a memo targeting a group of people based on their religious faith is not the work of the FBI leadership in Washington D.C., it is the work of the rank and file.

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The uncomfortable truth for many Republicans is that the cultural rot within the agency goes far beyond the director and his aides. It is a rot that extends down through the agency and has corrupted the rank-and-file, from Washington, to Richmond, Philadelphia, and beyond.

The next FBI director must be clear-eyed about this reality and be ready to make substantial reforms that every agent, from the headquarters all the way down to the most remote field office in Alaska, will feel. It is the only way to restore trust in the agency, and Rogers was not the man to do it.