Mental health, substance abuse staffers fired amid government shutdown: Sources
A view of the U.S. Capitol on September 29, 2025 in Washington, DC. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Dozens of employees at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration were laid off in the wave of government shutdown firings last week, multiple sources told ABC News.
Best known for overseeing the rollout of the 988 suicide prevention hotline, SAMHSA works with state and local governments on mental health and addiction initiatives and gives out billions in grants.
The firings, which began Friday, include widespread layoffs of staff that oversee child, adolescent and family mental health services, sources told ABC News.
Roughly one in 10 of SAMHSA’s 900 staff were fired in the spring Department of Government Efficiency cuts. Other staff were recently transferred to other programs in the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees SAMHSA.
A HHS spokesperson told ABC News that employees who received a Reduction in Force notice “were deemed non-essential by their respective division.”
While the impacts of these latest firings are still being determined, a source tells ABC the agency was “hard hit.”
ABC News’ Will McDuffie contributed to this report.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide — free, confidential help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Call or text the national lifeline at 988.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump suggested a criminal investigation into Christopher Wray, his appointee to lead the bureau in his first term, after a conservative media outlet reported the false claim that FBI agents were involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I would imagine. I would certainly imagine. I would think they are doing that,” Trump said in a phone interview with NBC News when asked whether the Justice Department should investigate Wray.
Trump appointed Wray to lead the bureau in 2017 after he fired former FBI Director James Comey. Comey was indicted in a grand jury last week on charges of making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation after Trump just days before publicly urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to act “now” to prosecute his foes.
In a brief video posted to his Instagram account, Comey said, “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice. I have great confidence in the federal judicial system and I am innocent, so let’s have a trial, and keep the faith.”
Wray opted to depart the bureau before Trump took office for his second term because he had fears that Trump firing him could cause turmoil within the department. Wray had also drawn Trump’s ire over investigations into election interference from the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s handling of classified documents, both of which were dropped after Trump won the 2024 election.
Trump first began suggesting Wray should be be investigated by the Justice Department after the conservative outlet The Blaze, citing an unidentified congressional source, reported last week that 274 FBI agents had been embedded in the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol.
Trump promoted The Blaze’s story on his social media platform on Saturday, saying “It was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed, against all Rules, Regulations, Protocols, and Standards, 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax. This is different from what Director Christopher Wray stated, over and over again! That’s right, as it now turns out, FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as “Law Enforcement Officials.”
“Christopher Wray, the then Director of the FBI, has some major explaining to do. That’s two in a row, Comey and Wray, who got caught LYING, with our Great Country at stake.”
The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General found no evidence that the FBI had undercover employees in the protest crowd in a December 2024 report. It also said that the FBI deployed tactical resources to the Capitol after the building had been breached by rioters and reports of two pipe bombs discovered at the Republican and Democratic national party headquarters.
That report also said while there were 26 informants in Washington, D.C., who were dubbed within the FBI as “confidential human sources,” or CHSs, the IG uncovered no evidence suggesting that any were instructed to join the assault on the Capitol or otherwise encourage illegal activity by members of the mob.
The IG report did not find fault with agents being sent to the Capitol where law enforcement had been overwhelmed and thousands of federal crimes had been committed, ranging from trespass and assault on federal officers to seditious conspiracy.
It’s not immediately clear whether Wray will be placed under criminal investigation, but Trump’s interview with NBC and his social media posts over the weekend show he appears to be increasingly emboldened in the wake of Comey’s indictment to call for the prosecution of more political foes.
In comments to reporters outside of the White House last week, Trump suggested he expected more criminal charges to be brought against his opponents while denying he was applying any direct pressure to Justice Department leadership.
“It’s not a list, but I think there will be others,” Trump told reporters. “I hope there will be others.”
U.S. President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting with members of his administration in the Cabinet Room of the White House on August 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. This is the seventh cabinet meeting of Trump’s second term. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — During an Oval Office event, President Donald Trump was asked about a video that began circulating online this past weekend of what appears to be a bag being thrown out of a second-story window at the White House.
Trump said on Tuesday that it was “probably AI-generated” and said that you can’t open the windows at the White House. It’s not clear when the alleged incident occurred.
A reporter asked if Trump was aware of the video, saying, “There is a video that is circulating online now of the White House where a window is open to the residence upstairs, and somebody is throwing a big bag out the window. Have you seen this?”
To which Trump suggested it was made with artificial intelligence and said, “You can’t open the windows. You know why? They’re all heavily armored and bulletproof.”
“I know every window up there,” Trump continued. “The last place I’d be doing it is that because there’s cameras all over the place, right? Including yours?” the president asked the reporter.
Earlier on Tuesday, however, a White House official implied in a statement to TIME magazine that the video was real and showed a contractor doing “regular maintenance.”
ABC News has reached out to the White House about the discrepancies between the two different answers.
ABC News has not independently verified the video’s authenticity. But one expert said it appeared unlikely the video is an AI fake. Hany Farid, chief science officer at GetReal Labs and an expert on synthetic media, told ABC News that he does not see any evidence that indicates the video is AI-generated.
“I’m not seeing any evidence that this video is AI-generated or manipulated,” Farid said. “We do not detect any digital watermarks that are sometimes inserted at the point of AI-generation. The shadows in the scene, including the shadow cast by the tossed bag, are all physically consistent. The motion of the waving flags has none of the tell-tale signs that you often see in AI-generated videos. The overall structure of the White House appears to be consistent, including the flying of the American and POW/MIA flag.”
Farid noted that AI-based video generation models today typically produce videos no more than eight to 10 seconds long, a limitation that can be circumvented by stitching two clips together by generating a new video based on the final frame of the last one.
“Having said that, the length of this video does add some evidence that it is unlikely to be AI-generated,” Farid said.
Attorney General Pam Bondi arrives to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, October 7, 2025 in Washington. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) —President Donald Trump’s tightening grip over the Justice Department to target his political opponents and lawmakers’ increasing calls for the release of more files from federal investigations into deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein took center stage at a contentious Senate hearing Tuesday for Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is the first time since July that Bondi has faced questions from lawmakers and follows a tumultuous summer for the department that included deployments of federal law enforcement to Democratic-run cities, a growing number of investigations announced into Trump’s political foes and the controversial indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley kicked off the hearing with extensive remarks seeking to highlight instances of what Republicans have labeled “weaponization” of the Justice Department under the Biden Administration, citing selective disclosures by FBI Director Kash Patel of the investigation into President Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss.
“These are indefensible acts,” Grassley said. “This was a political phishing expedition to get Trump at all costs.”
Specifically, Grassley singled out a timely disclosure by the FBI on Monday that showed former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigators at one point sought limited phone toll records of several Republican senators around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
As part of his investigation, Smith extensively investigated Trump and his allies’ pressure campaign on lawmakers to block the certification of former President Joe Biden’s election win — including calls that were made to senators after the Capitol was breached by the pro-Trump mob.
There’s no indication that Republican senators were a target of Smith’s investigation, and the toll records sought by investigators would not include any information about the content of conversations they may have had.
“We’re pointing this all out because we can’t have this repeated in the United States,” Grassley said. “We want to end it right now, whether we have Republican or Democrat administrations.”
Grassley made no mention of recent directives from Trump to have the Justice Department act “now” to carry out prosecutions of his political foes, or other instances of alleged politicization during Bondi’s tenure that have led to scores of departures of longtime career officials who have sounded alarm about the department being used as a tool to enact political retribution.
Ranking Democratic member Dick Durbin said in his opening statement assailed the Trump administration for the conduct in Chicago, a city in which Durbin represents.
“As President Trump turns the full force of the federal government on Chicago and other American cities, the assault on the city I am proud to represent is just one example of how President Trump and Attorney General Bondi shut down justice at the Department of Justice, even before the president’s party controlling the white House, Senate and House of Representatives shut down the government,” Durbin said.
“The attorney general has systematically weaponized our nation’s leading law enforcement agency to protect President Trump and his allies and attack his opponents. And sadly, the American people. You have purged hundreds of senior career officials since you first appeared before us,” he added.
Durbin listed off the greatest hits for critics of Bondi’s Justice Department, not to include the closed investigation into Border Czar Tom Homan, the Eric Adams case being dropped, the hiring of a Jan. 6 defendant who attacked MPD officers, the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and the case against James Comey.
“What has taken place since Jan. 20, 2025, would make even President Nixon recoil. This is your legacy,” Durbin said.
Bondi pushed back against her critics and Democrats during the hearing. In her opening statement, she framed her tenure as the “end” of weaponization of law enforcement, while reinforcing her extensive efforts to enact President Trump’s agenda.
“We will work to earn that back every single day. We are returning to our core mission of fighting real crime. While there is more work to do, I believe in eight short months we have made tremendous progress towards those ends,” she said.
She also railed against judges who have ruled against the administration in the months since Trump took office, while highlighting the Justice Department’s string of victories at the Supreme Court.
“My attorneys have done incredible work advancing President Trump’s agenda and protecting the Executive Branch from judicial overreach,” she said.
Bondi continued to hit back at Durbin, who questioned her about the federal deployment to Illinois.
The attorney general taunted the senator about Chicago’s crime rate. Bondi said that Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche were on their way to the city.
As ABC News first reported, the move to seek Comey’s indictment came over the objections of career prosecutors and followed Trump’s removal of his appointee to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, who expressed reservations about pursuing charges against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, sources told ABC News.
Trump eventually installed a White House aide and former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan to lead the office and move forward with the case against Comey, and a grand jury narrowly voted to indict him on two counts of making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation — while declining to indict on a third false statements charge. Comey has denied wrongdoing and is set to appear Thursday in federal court for his arraignment.
While sources told ABC News that leadership at the DOJ expressed reservations about pursuing the case, Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel went on to publicly cheer news of Comey’s indictment in news interviews and social media posts.
The next week, the administration moved to fire a top national security prosecutor in the office, Michael Ben’Ary, over a misleading social media post that falsely suggested he was among the prosecutors who resisted charging Comey.
Ben’Ary was leading a major case against one of the alleged plotters of the Abbey Gate bombing during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In a scathing departure letter, Ben’Ary set his sights squarely on the Justice Department’s leadership and labeled his removal as just one in a series of recent moves taken to root out career officials for political reasons at the expense of the nation’s security.
“This example highlights the most troubling aspect of the current operations of the Department of Justice: the leadership is more concerned with punishing the President’s perceived enemies than they are with protecting our national security,” Ben’Ary wrote. “Justice for Americans killed and injured by our enemies should not be contingent on what someone in the Department of Justice sees in their social media feed that day.”
The DOJ declined to comment when asked about Ben’Ary’s letter.
Those actions have caused unprecedented turmoil at the Eastern District, which oversees some of the nation’s most sensitive national security, terrorism and espionage investigations.
Current and former officials say that turmoil has reverberated further across the Justice Department’s workforce around the country, with attorneys concerned they’ll face professional repercussions if they resist taking part in politicized investigations or prosecutions.
On Monday, nearly 300 DOJ employees who left the department since Trump’s inauguration released a letter on the eve of Bondi’s hearing describing her leadership as “appalling” in its treatment of the career workforce and the elimination of longstanding norms of independence from the White House.
“We call on Congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities far more vigorously,” the former employees said. “Members in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle must provide a meaningful check on the abuses we’re witnessing. And we call on all Americans — whose safety, prosperity, and rights depend on a strong DOJ — to speak out against its destruction.”
The DOJ declined to comment on the letter.
Bondi will likely also face heavy scrutiny over conflicting statements out of the administration on the Epstein files, after the Justice Department and FBI said in a July letter that no further releases were warranted and that there was no evidence suggesting others participated or enabled Epstein’s abuse of minor girls.
Democrats have accused the administration of seeking to cover up any mentions of Trump or high-profile appointees who had past associations with Epstein, which the administration has denied.
Trump and Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking young girls and women, were friends in the 1990s but the president said the relationship soured after Epstein poached some employees from Trump’s Florida club after he explicitly warned him not to do so.
An effort underway in the House of Representatives to hold a vote on a measure that would demand the administration release the entirety of the files has been put on hold after Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home amid the ongoing government shutdown.
The recent rise in acts of political violence will also likely be a central focus of questions for Bondi. Trump has recently ordered the department to ramp up investigations into so-called “radical left” organizations that he and other senior White House officials have alleged, without providing evidence, as helping to fund perpetrators who have attacked federal law enforcement officials dispatched around the country.
Just days after Trump’s comments, a senior official in the Justice Department ordered several U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country to prepare to open sweeping criminal investigations in to the Open Society Foundations founded by billionaire George Soros, naming criminal statutes ranging from robbery, material support for terrorism and racketeering, ABC News previously confirmed.
In a statement, the Open Society Foundations called the accusations “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech.”
In her most recent appearances before the House and Senate in late June, Bondi sought to brush off pointed questions from Democrats by repeatedly deflecting to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in their states and districts that were among the briefing materials she brought with her to the hearings.
She has also dismissed any characterization of the Justice Department appearing to work in lockstep with the White House as “politicization” of law enforcement. Bondi and other senior DOJ officials have instead argued that the two federal cases brought against Trump by a special counsel under the Biden Administration represented a far more egregious example of weaponization, echoing grievances leveled at the department by Trump.
“Whether you’re a former FBI director, whether you’re a former head of an intel community, whether you are a current state and local elected official, whether you are a billionaire funding organizations to try to keep Donald Trump out of office — everything is on the table,” Bondi said in a Fox News appearance last month. “We will investigate and will end the weaponization — no longer will there be a two-tier system of justice.”