The 35,000 employees at the Federal Bureau Investigation were not notified — officially — until after 8 p.m. Tuesday that Director James B. Comey had been fired by the president, more than two hours after White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced it to the media.

So the special agents, intelligence analysts, language experts, IT specialists and other support staff at the country’s top law enforcement agency learned of the bombshell decision on Fox News, CNN or MSNBC. And they watched in disbelief as television reports revealed that Comey himself only learned of his dismissal while he was in Los Angeles addressing a group of FBI employees, who saw the news flashed across television screens.

“It’s just wrong the way they went about it,” said Nathan Catura, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, which represents 27,000 law enforcement agents, among them 3,000 FBI agents. “Here’s a man who’s been a public servant for 30 years. He’s dedicated his life to the American people and this is the way he gets treated?”

He was optimistic, though, that the investigation into President Trump’s associates’ possible connections with Russian officials would continue.

“Something this big, there isn’t any way this investigation gets shut down and no one’s going to say anything,” he said.

(Jason Aldag,Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told employees in an email that surfaced on Twitter that Trump “has exercised his lawful authority to remove James B. Comey, Jr., as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By operation of law and effective immediately, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe assumed the position of Acting Director of the FBI.

“As you well know,” Sessions wrote, “the FBI is an exceptional law enforcement and intelligence agency. It is made so by you, the devoted men and women who work tirelessly to keep our country safe.”

Reporting for work to the bureau’s Washington headquarters on the morning after, employees scurried into the J. Edgar Hoover Building with their federal security lanyards and backpacks, presenting a face of business as unusual.

German shepherds sniffed cars at the police checkpoint at the entrance on 10th Street Northwest. Three FBI police vans patrolled outside the entrance near the employee ramp into the building. A contractor wheeled computer equipment inside.

“Our cases are still moving forward, and everything we were doing yesterday we are doing today,” said Tom O’Connor, a veteran agent on the domestic terrorism squad who is president of the FBI Agents Association, which advocates for more than 13,000 active and former special agents.

But it was not business as usual, as employees described being stunned by the news and — even if they did not support their embattled boss — confused by the timing of the White House action and how it was carried out.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican, it’s crazy,” said one man who works in tech support and pointed out that he voted for Trump. He was at home Tuesday night, working on house renovations, when he turned on Fox News and could not believe what he saw.

(Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)

“This was unbelievable,” he said. In 26 years, through four FBI directors, he had never seen something so brazen as this firing, he said, then pointed to a Metrobus picking up passengers across the street to describe the mood in his office. “It’s like that bus barreling right over here and not stopping.”

The man, like others interviewed Tuesday morning, would not identify himself in keeping with an agency-wide directive not to speak with reporters about Comey’s dismissal.

Whether they were Comey loyalists or critical of his handling of the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, employees described dread and uncertainty, in particular about the fate of the agency’s ongoing probe into possible connections with Russia.

“I’m shocked,” an administrative assistant said at a coffee break, calling the president’s action an abuse of power against a leader who she said had encouraged rank-and-file employees in his three years as director to bring grievances up the chain of command. “We thought he was safe.”

A sudden sense of camaraderie took over at the guard station, as an FBI police officer checked employees’ identification before waving them into the underground parking lot. “They’re all saying, ‘It’s going to be a long day,’ ” the officer said.

O’Connor said Comey had enormous support from agents because he was willing to meet with them directly and signed off last summer on places in the FBI Hall of Honor for six fallen agents who died of cancers they developed from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. O’Connor said he could not discuss “the politics” of the firing. But he was emphatic: “The vast majority of rank-and-file agents actually like Jim Comey, and they believed in him. It’s a hit for the agent population. It’s a gut punch.”

Others were split on the politics. “I’m surprised Trump wouldn’t look favorably on someone who handed him the election,” one employee said. The contractor rolling computer equipment into the building identified himself as a Trump supporter and said he had confidence in the president’s explanation for firing Comey over Clinton’s emails. “I keep my mouth shut, which is probably what Comey should have done.”

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