James Comey thought he had a year. That’s the amount of time it was likely going to take the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General to probe Comey’s actions in handling the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. If President Donald Trump was looking for a pretext to fire the F.B.I. director, a critical inspector general’s report could presumably provide it. Next year.

Clearly, Comey underestimated Trump’s impatience—as well as the president’s pathological inability to allow anyone to question the legitimacy of his election, let alone keep pressing the investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible ties with Russia. Comey is now puttering in his yard in Northern Virginia. But the political and legal whirlwind that his firing has set in motion is just beginning to spin, with the White House and the F.B.I. subject to the greatest damage. Even pro-Trump agents are horrified and furious at how Comey was treated. “It shows us, the career people who care only about justice, that there is no justice at the top,” one agent says.

There were agents who found Comey priggish; within the bureau’s New York office, there was a faction that thought he’d soft-peddled the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. But those complaints have now been dwarfed by shock and revulsion at how Comey was fired—and how it reflects on them. “The statements from the White House that he’d lost the faith of the rank and file—they’re making that up,” says Jeff Ringel, a 21-year F.B.I. veteran who retired in May 2016 and is now director of the Soufan Group. “Agents may not have agreed with everything he did. I was one of the people who thought the director shouldn’t have stepped up and made those public statements about Hillary Clinton. But Director Comey was one of the last honest brokers in D.C. Agents are pissed off at the way he was fired, the total disrespect with which it was handled. It was a slap in the face to the F.B.I., to everybody in the F.B.I. The director being treated terribly, being called incompetent, is a signal that Trump has disdain for the bureau.”

The desire to defend the F.B.I.’s honor, and to set the record straight, appears to be already motivating law-enforcement sources to try to punch holes in Trump’s version of events. On Thursday afternoon, acting F.B.I. director Andrew McCabe contradicted the White House’s account that Comey had lost the support of the agency. Others dispute the president’s claim that Comey informed him, “on three separate occasions,” that he was not under investigation. “That makes no sense,” one bureau veteran says. “I wasn’t in those meetings. But no prosecutor would make that statement to someone who could conceivably become the subject of an investigation. Jim wouldn’t have done it.” (By press time, the White House had not responded to a request for comment.)

Filmmaker Marc Levin spent much of 2016 shooting the documentary series Inside the FBI for the USA Network, and got to know both Comey and a wide variety of F.B.I. staff well. “Look, Comey made mistakes, but he was popular with the majority of people we worked with at the F.B.I.,” Levin says. “He was a tremendous motivator and a booster of the institution. So there’s a lot of pain.” An F.B.I. insider goes further. “This is a kick in the gut,” he says. “The way it was done was an insult—degrading, humiliating—not just to Comey the individual, but to the institution of the F.B.I. There’s a lot of anger.”