A former FBI official slammed FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday for reportedly firing an agent trainee who displayed a gay pride flag on his desk.
“This is insane on so many levels,” said Michael Feinberg, a former assistant special agent in charge, in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
Patel — who notified the agent in training of his immediate termination in a letter dated Oct. 1 — cited the agent trainee’s “poor judgement” for placing “an inappropriate display of political signage” on his desk while assigned to the Los Angeles field office under Joe Biden’s administration, according to MSNBC.
The letter didn’t explicitly refer to the pride flag. CNN was first to report the firing.
The agent trainee — a longtime employee with the FBI — was the recipient of multiple awards for service, was a field office diversity program coordinator and displayed a pride flag at his workstation, per CNN. Two agency veterans told the network that such a display doesn’t violate the FBI’s past policies.
Wednesday’s firing arrives less than a week after reports surfaced on the FBI terminating more than a dozen agents who were pictured kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington, D.C., following the murder of George Floyd.
Trump — when asked by Real America’s Voice reporter Brian Glenn last month about “a lot of people” feeling “threatened” by the Progress Pride flag, which includes elements of the transgender flag — said he would have “no problem” banning its display if the First Amendment didn’t get in the way.
HuffPost has reached out to the FBI for comment.
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Feinberg, in his interview with Wallace, noted that there are considerations under the Hatch Act that prohibit certain types of “political advocacy” by federal employees. However, a pride flag “implicates none of those.”
He added that every FBI field office and Justice Department building would fly the pride flag outside of their facilities in June when he worked for the FBI.
“So what this employee was doing was not at all out of line, out of the norm or at all inappropriate,” Feinberg said. “It’s absolute madness, and the fact that Kash Patel would go after this individual is lunacy.”
Feinberg claimed that the agent trainee — whom he didn’t name — won an Attorney General’s Award, the DOJ’s highest award for investigative or prosecutorial accomplishments.
Feinberg, who spent a portion of his career at the FBI in the same office as the agent trainee, said his old colleagues stressed the importance of the employee’s involvement in the agency.
“This erosion of constitutional protections and rule of law is getting so far out of hand that I don’t understand why American citizens are putting up with it,” he said.