The typical Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent is white, male, and middle-aged, often with a military background — in short, drawn from the segment of the U.S. population most likely to support GOP nominee Donald Trump.

That demographic reality explains much of the heat FBI Director James Comey is taking from his own work force at the moment for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation and inquiries into the Clinton Foundation.


Days before the presidential election, FBI finds itself at the center of a political maelstrom, with Comey being sharply criticized by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and even President Barack Obama, who’ve faulted the FBI director for going public with word of new evidence in the Clinton email probe.

That furor has exposed dissension in the FBI’s ranks, prompting a flurry of leaks about alleged efforts to impede the Clinton-related inquiries and exposing lingering anger among agents about Comey’s July decision not to recommend any charges in the email probe.

Incendiary, politically charged remarks from former FBI officials — with one prominent ex-FBI leader publicly calling the Clintons a “crime family” — are also endangering the law enforcement agency’s reputation for sober, nonpartisan investigation.

Largely overlooked in the imbroglio is how the fact that the FBI doesn’t look much like America is complicating Comey’s effort to extricate himself and his agency from the political firestorm.

According to numbers from August, 67 percent of FBI agents are white men. Fewer than 20 percent are women. The number of African-American agents hovers around 4.5 percent, with Asian-Americans about the same and Latinos at about 6.5 percent.

If Trump were running for president with an electorate that looked like that, he’d win in a landslide.

“The bureau does tend to be more conservative than people you see in the general populace. It’s a natural outgrowth of the demographics. … That’s just math, ” said retired agent Emmanuel Johnson, one of several African-American agents who sued the FBI for racial discrimination in the 1990s. “What’s troubling is you look at the same population groups they were having trouble [recruiting] 20, 30, 40 years ago and they’re having the same trouble today.”

Comey has publicly insisted that his agents are apolitical. Asked last year whether politics might color the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation, the FBI chief was indignant.

“If you know my folks, you know they don't give a rip about politics," Comey told reporters.

But with numerous leaks from inside the bureau in the final weeks of the presidential race and some prominent former officials denouncing Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton in scathing terms, the FBI chief’s assurances that the bureau is completely untainted by politics are in doubt.

“The Clintons: That’s a crime family, basically. It’s like organized crime,” former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom said on New York radio station WNYM-AM on Sunday. “I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool. We don’t have enough time to talk about the things they’ve done, screwing people and the public in general. It’s just outrageous how Hillary Clinton sold her office for money. And she’s a pathological liar and she’s always been a liar.”

“The agents are furious with what’s going on. I know that for a fact,” Kallstrom added.

Other ex-FBI officials confirm an uproar in the ranks.

“The stuff about a rebellion going on inside the bureau is absolutely true, but that's not going to influence his decision," one former top bureau official said of Comey, while expressing doubt such concerns played a role in his decisions on the Clinton email case or about informing Congress of new developments, as he did last Friday.

“He loves his troops, but it's not a fair judgment that that's why he did it,” said the ex-official, who asked not to be named.

Current FBI officials also insist that Comey’s decisions on the Clinton email probe, recommending its closure without charges in July and telling Congress about new evidence last week, were made without any eye to politics.

However, it’s clear that the FBI director has felt an unusual need to explain those moves to his own work force, perhaps detecting deep skepticism. The director has sent two agencywide memos defending his handling of the email mess.

“The case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case,” Comey wrote in a two-page memo to FBI personnel in September explaining the agency’s conclusions in the case. He seemed to acknowledge that he was getting grief about the decision from former FBI agents he had met around the country.

When Comey decided last Friday to notify Congress about new evidence in the Clinton email probe, he also fired off a two-paragraph letter to all hands, acknowledging that the move was sure to stir controversy.

“We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,” the director wrote. “In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it.”

Some former FBI officials saw the messages as an acknowledgement that the FBI’s rank-and-file were suspicious of the decisions being made at the top.

“I think Comey saw he was losing the agents,” former FBI agent Ivian Smith said.

Another sign of such trouble: a steady stream of leaks out of the bureau, many of them apparently coming from New York-based agents unhappy with decisions to keep an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in low gear.

“The insurrections usually come out of the New York office,” Smith observed.

Another former official said the trouble for Comey began with his early July press statement, in which he was sharply critical of Clinton, then said there were would be no charges. That confused many inside the bureau.

“I think they looked at it and said what he laid out in his July 5 press conference was ample information that they had specific violations of federal law,” said former FBI assistant director Tom Fuentes. “When I talked to other people watching that, I thought, he’s actually going to recommend the charge. When he didn’t ... there were some in the ranks who were concerned about why.”

Fuentes blames part of Comey’s predicament on the unusual partial recusal Attorney General Loretta Lynch made after holding a meeting with President Bill Clinton on an airplane tarmac in Phoenix in June. She later said she’d defer to career prosecutors and the FBI on the case. That put an unusual degree of weight on the FBI chief in a highly politically-charged case, the former official said.

Fuentes also said he’s worried that the current flurry of charges and countercharges could damage the FBI’s credibility not just domestically, but around the world, where the agency is seen as the gold standard for detached, professional law enforcement.

“I think it’s a possibility people are going to think the FBI is totally politicized,” Fuentes said. “When you have people saying the FBI has either been corrupted or is incompetent or both, that is serious stuff.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

However, one FBI official noted that Comey sends agencywide messages on a variety of topics and added that the Clinton probe-related messages only seemed unusual in large part because Comey’s decision to make a public statement about a case where no charges were filed was an unusual one.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing in September, Comey insisted he was unaware that the decision to conclude the Clinton email probe without recommending charges had caused any backlash within the bureau. He also seemed personally pained by the suggestion.

“This has provoked some controversy within the ranks of current and former agents?” Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) asked.

“Not within the FBI. Again, who knows what people don't tell the director,” Comey replied. “If there are agents in the FBI who are concerned or confused about this, please contact me. We will get you the transparency you need to see that your brothers and sisters did this the way you would want them to.”

Told that some agents believed a decision was made not to prosecute Clinton even before her July 2 interview at FBI headquarters, Comey seemed troubled.

“If colleagues of ours believe I am lying about when I made this decision, please urge them to contact me privately, so we can have a conversation about this.”

Now, there’s little doubt that Comey finds himself caught in the middle, under fire from the left and the right, as well as some in his own organization.

While the FBI director has been mounting an aggressive drive to focus on the FBI’s shortcomings in diversity, it’s less clear if he anticipated how the make-up of his own work force would complicate the handling politically polarizing investigations.

However, he has described the demographic challenges in stark, urgent terms.

“We have a crisis in the FBI and it is this: slowly but steadily over the last decade or more, the percentage of special agents in the FBI who are white has been growing, ... We are now 83 percent white in our special agent cadre,” the FBI director said in a July speech at historically black Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. “I’ve got nothing against white people — especially tall, awkward, male white people — but that is a crisis for reasons that you get and that I’ve worked very hard to make sure the entire FBI understands. That is a path to fall down a flight of stairs.”

For the embattled FBI chief and former prosecutor, there is some good news. There are early signs that his focus on diversity — which includes displaying a rainbow flag on the FBI’s recruiting website — may be paying off.

The number of African-American agents climbed to 603 in August, up from 581 in March. However, both numbers are lower than the 652 the bureau had four years ago.

The number of Latinos also ticked up slightly, to 888 from 882 in March, but still well below the 983 the FBI had in 2012.

Comey has said he doesn’t want to “jinx” himself, but believes the decline in minority agents is being reversed.

“I will have failed if I don’t change this. And I have a good feeling it’s already changing,” he said in July. “I don’t want to jinx it … but we’re making progress. People are understanding: It’s not just ‘the man.’”