Agents within the FBI are worried that President Donald Trump may succeed in killing the probe into his campaign’s ties to Russia. The Daily Beast is reporting on what has happened at the FBI since James Comey was fired on Tuesday. They say that agents who are working on the investigation fear they will be transferred to other departments and that their work will be discontinued. Comey, they say, was much more important to the investigation than many, who are outside of the agency, understand. While he may not not have actively been conducting the investigation, his active support helped it continue.

A former lawyer in the Department of Justice’s National Security Department, Carrie Cordero, said, “He gave the agents, the investigators, cover politically. He said, ‘You go where the facts take you and I will handle the politics of it, I’ll go brief the Hill, I’ll hold off the White House.’ He’s the lineman in football, keeping everybody away from the guys that are trying to run or make the pass. He provided a cover for them to do what they needed to get done.”

One FBI source said, “Management in counterintelligence are insanely concerned, worried about the overreaching obstruction and political influence from the White House.”

What could the White House do to stop the investigation? One former FBI official says,“They could slow down the investigations to a crawl, prevent charges from moving forward to DOJ for prosecution, or any other number of ways the White House could subvert these investigations,” said a former FBI official who worked on Russian investigations.

A former FBI official, who was in the counterintelligence department, said, “You have to remember, these agents have families they need to support. The threat of being fired for doing their job is real here.”

And what about the testimony Andrew McCabe gave before the Senate that the investigation would continue? One Congressional staffer said, “Literally who cares, nothing he said matters. He’ll be gone.”

Of course, gumming up the works and intimidating FBI agents are not the only two things the White House can do to thwart an active FBI investigation. They can make sure it hits a wall when it gets to the prosecutorial stage at the Department of Justice. Whereas the FBI is made up of career law enforcement personnel, the Department of Justice is headed by a number of political appointees

Former assistant director of the bureau’s Criminal Investigation Division, Ron Hosko said, “There are often frustrations in sensitive, important investigations that you end up with prosecutors—either too few, who are unwilling to move forward at the desired pace, or too many and you turn every simple decision into a debate club—and it slows progress. Here, I think that is the pulse that you in the media and others ought to be keeping close to: What’s the pace. Are the investigators getting the prosecutors’ support that they need?”

Hosko added, “Prosecutors will sometimes start to debate and question every word in a subpoena and it tends to slow progress. And then you start to ask questions about—is this because of something political?”

Hosko concluded with, “The Orange blob in the WH doesn’t care about anyone or anything he can’t control. He’s made that abundantly clear.”All of this means that it is critically important to appoint a special prosecutor to look into this. It is more than clear that the Trump Department of Justice cannot be trusted to handle this investigation.

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