Jeff Stein, Michael Isikoff, and Karen J. Greenberg report:

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. [Continue reading…]