FBI official Marshall Yates, who led the bureau’s congressional affairs office and played a key role in President Donald Trump’s investigation of his political enemies, is leaving his role, according to a report.
Yates, a former Capitol Hill staffer from Alabama, follows former deputy director Dan Bongino in leaving Kash Patel’s agency after less than a year, and is doing so to spend more time with his family, CBS News reports.
Yates, who took office last March, served as point man for discussions with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley.
Sen. Grassley released a series of documents last year related to past FBI investigations into Trump, in which the names of agents involved were not redacted, leading to their frequent dismissal.
The purge continued on Wednesday when Patel fired another 10 employees who had worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the president for allegedly hoarding classified documents from his first term at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Yates also served as one of the FBI representatives on the Department of Justice-led Weaponization Working Group, an interagency task force set up by the Trump administration to re-examine the conduct of those agencies during the Joe Biden era in search of potential instances of political bias.
The group looked at the prosecution of Trump supporters over their actions during the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, the allegedly unjust firing of former agents for objecting to Covid-19 protocols during the pandemic and other matters of controversy.
Their work was defended last September by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said: “It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponized the Department of Justice, and nobody knows what that looks like more than President Trump.
“We are not going to tolerate gaslighting from anyone in the media or from anyone on the other side who is trying to say that it’s the president who is weaponizing the DOJ.
“It was Joe Biden and his attorney general who weaponized the DOJ. Joe Biden abused this sacred American institution to go after his political opponent in an election year.”
Yates was previously a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who was hired as counsel by Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks before being promoted to chief of staff.
He then served as counsel to Kentucky GOP Rep. Thomas Massie from 2023.
Both Brooks and Massie have been critical of the FBI in the past, and the latter remains locked in conflict with the DOJ over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, for which he has long campaigned.
Yates was also an executive director of the Election Integrity Network, which campaigned for the overturning of the results of the 2020 presidential election in line with Trump’s still-unproven narrative that Biden’s win was the result of widespread fraud.
ProPublica previously reported in November that Yates, Bongino, and Nicole Rucker, Patel’s personal assistant, were all granted high-level security clearances at the FBI despite failing to clear polygraph exams.
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