Trump plans visit to LA wildfire zones, pushes to withhold aid

(WASHINGTON) — Dozens of Department of Education employees received letters as business hours closed Friday placing them on administrative leave, according to a copy of one letter obtained by ABC News.

While no specific reason was given, some employees told ABC News they believe the only common thread among them is that they attended a voluntary training called the “Diversity Change-Agent Training Program.”

The letter states that the administrative leave notice is not for disciplinary purposes. Rather, it’s being issued under President Donald Trump’s executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and “further guidance” from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, according to the letter.

Per the letter, employees will receive full pay and benefits through the end of the administrative leave. They are not required to do work-related tasks during this time, nor are they required to come into the office. Employees who were placed on leave also had their government email access suspended as they received the letters. There’s no set time for the leave period, according to the letter.

The letters have caused a frenzy throughout the department, as some employees had been locked out of their accounts and had to check their private email addresses for the notice, according to Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 252.

Smith told ABC News more than 50 employees in “extremely diverse roles” within the department received the email notices to their government email addresses or their private email accounts after regular business hours over the weekend.

ABC News spoke with three Department of Education employees who received the letters and described their leave as “paid administrative hell” since Friday evening.

“It’s very, very, unsettling,” one department employee of over 20 years, who works in Washington, D.C., told ABC News. “I don’t get it. What’s my crime? What have I done?”

Smith said the positions of Department of Education employees placed on leave run the gamut, from senior civil rights attorneys to attorneys for borrower defense to press specialists. She said she feared more letters would be sent in the coming days.

An attorney who works for the department in Washington, D.C., said they were put on leave from their “dream job.” The employee has two children and received the notice after putting them to bed on Friday night, they said. The person said Friday was tough and the news was shocking to receive, but now they’re feeling “different levels” of sadness.

“My mood felt a little bit different just waking up knowing that I wasn’t going to be working,” the employee told ABC News.

“But I just feel like there’s a lot of information that I’m trying to process and, with small kids, it’s like you’re trying to balance a lot,” the employee added.

The letters came as the Trump administration worked to scrub the federal government’s DEI policies and programs. The president issued an executive order during his first week in office calling on agencies to “combat” private-sector DEI programs.

Trump’s rhetoric — including threatening for months to shutter the Department of Education — has created fear throughout the department, according to Smith.

“People took these jobs because they care about the mission,” Smith told ABC News. “And so it absolutely impacts us. You know, the very thing that brought us to these jobs we’re unable to do.”

The department employee with two small children has worked for the department for just over four years and comes from a family of educators. The employee said education is the “great equalizer,” and the Department of Education benefits everyone.

“I believe in the department,” the department attorney said, adding: “I always wanted to work here.”

In a statement to ABC News, Department of Education Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications Madi Biedermann said the president was elected to enact “unprecedented reform” that is merit-based and efficient at serving the interests of the American people.

“We are evaluating staffing in line with the commitment to prioritizing meaningful learning ahead of divisive ideology in schools and putting student outcomes above special interests,” Biedermann wrote.

ABC News has reached out to the White House for comment.

Meanwhile, the three department employees who spoke to ABC News said they’re completely stumped on why they were issued administrative leave notices. The department employee with decades of experience in Washington also said it’s puzzling, in part, because during Trump’s first term, managers were evaluated on upholding DEI standards via a department performance rating system.

“We were expected to do DEI,” the employee said. “That’s what Trump and [then-Education Secretary] Betsy DeVos wanted us to do. They wanted to do that. They put it in our [performance] plans. We did not put that in our plans. And not only that, it is in every manager’s plan in the department, not just people that are on administrative leave.”

“Every single person in the Department of Education that’s a supervisor or a manager right now has [DEI] in their performance plan — that is programmed in by the department,” the employee added.

The administrative leave notices may have been tied to a two-day “Diversity Change-Agent Training Program,” a facilitator-led training, according to training document slides obtained by ABC News. The training took place over two days dating as far back as March 2019, under DeVos and during Trump’s first term, according to a February 2019 email obtained by ABC News with the subject “Diversity Change Agent Course.”

The training program aimed to create specific action plans to “drive diversity and inclusion” and increase creativity and innovation. The program also challenged employees to achieve greater results by championing the diversity of its workforce while creating and sustaining an inclusive environment, according to the training document slides.

Another department employee, who took the 2019 training and works remotely out of the New York offices, called the notice “bizarre,” especially since the 2019 training occurred during the president’s first term.

“The whole thing is bizarre,” the department employee told ABC News. “Betsy DeVos — and [Trump’s] prior administration — was a decent champion of these programs, and they didn’t come with any warning to me to say, ‘Hey, taking this training might lead to an adverse personnel action one day,’ right? So it’s just strange how they can retroactively apply something.”

The department employees on leave who spoke to ABC News said they have no official DEI responsibilities in their roles. All three department employees who spoke with ABC News also confirmed the only DEI-like program that would potentially be barred under Trump’s executive order would be the change-agent training sessions.

However, to their knowledge, the three employees on leave said there’s no official list or way of matching the employees on administrative leave with the training programs. Even though they’re convinced these trainings link them to the Trump administration’s definition of DEI, the employees haven’t confirmed why they’re on leave, according to the ones who spoke to ABC News.

The employee who works out of New York has more than a dozen years of experience in administering federal programs. Multiple other employees on administrative leave that this employee spoke to over the weekend said they also took the 2019 training, according to the employee.

“That’s the only thing we can think of that any of us did,” the employee said.

After reaching out to other colleagues with the same titles, the employee in New York said, they “pieced it together.” This employee said they took at least three training programs like the diversity change-agent training program since the initial training.

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(WASHINGTON) — As Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, appears Thursday for his Senate confirmation hearing, some of the rhetoric he has espoused for years to defend Trump and promote Trump’s reelection is sure to elicit sharp questions about whether he is fit to lead one of the nation’s premiere law enforcement agencies.

Patel has derided the FBI as the “Federal Bureau of Insanity.” He’s announced “a mission to annihilate the ‘Deep State'” — what he calls a “cabal of unelected tyrants” inside government, undermining Trump. He’s said the conspiracy theory QAnon, claiming a secret global plot to traffic children and take down Trump, is right in many ways and “should get credit for all the things” it has accomplished. And he once promised to “come after” and prosecute “the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” who “helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election.”

On a podcast two years ago, Trump adviser Roger Stone told Patel his critics are right about one thing: “You are a Trump loyalist.”

Patel chuckled and nodded affirmatively.

But that’s just what Democrats — and even some Republicans — on the Senate Judiciary Committee may wonder about most: If confirmed, is Patel so loyal to Trump that he would use the FBI to push Trump’s political agenda and target Trump’s perceived enemies?

‘An existential threat’

According to Patel, the FBI has already become a political weapon — especially with its multiple investigations of Trump, including the unprecedented search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 — and that’s what he wants to change.

“The rot at the core of the FBI isn’t just scandalous, it’s an existential threat to our republican form of government,” Patel wrote in his book, published two years ago, titled “Government Gangsters.”

Trump, on social media, called Patel’s book “the roadmap to end the Deep State’s reign” when it came out.

Many of Trump’s allies in Congress have lauded Patel’s nomination, touting him as the change agent needed at the top of an embattled agency. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has called Patel’s career “a study in fighting for unpopular but righteous causes, exposing corruption, and putting America First.”

Democrats, however, not only point to what they see as Patel’s concerning rhetoric — but also what they’ve described as his relative lack of experience for such a significant position.

After meeting with Patel last week, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he has “grave concerns” about Patel’s nomination, declaring, “Mr. Patel has neither the experience, the temperament, nor the judgment to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

‘I just got to my breaking point’

Now in his mid-40s, Patel grew up on New York’s Long Island, ultimately deciding to attend law school after caddying for a group of criminal defense attorneys at the Garden City County Club. By his own account, in 2005, he graduated from Pace University Law school in the bottom third of his class — something he was “very proud of,” he once joked.

After law school, he spent nine years as a public defender, and in late 2013 he moved to Washington, D.C., to join the Justice Department’s National Security Division as a terrorism prosecutor, helping U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country prosecute their cases.

He was involved in Justice Department cases all over the world, including ones stemming from the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi and the 2010 World Cup bombings in Uganda.

But in his book and in media interviews, he said he grew frustrated with his time at the Justice Department, especially after a dust-up with a federal judge that made national headlines.

In early 2016, while Patel was in Tajikistan for work, the judge presiding over one of his cases in Texas called for an in-person hearing back in the United States. Patel didn’t have a suit or tie with him in Tajikistan, and after racing halfway around the world to make the hearing, the judge badgered him to “dress like a lawyer” and “act like a lawyer,” according to a transcript of the exchange.

“You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” the judge added.

As Patel recounted in his book, his bosses at the Justice Department privately expressed support for him, but when the Washington Post wrote a story about it two weeks later, the Justice Department, in Patel’s telling, refused to defend him publicly, so the newspaper “dragged my name through the mud.”

Patel has also described how he grew upset over the Justice Department’s handling of the Benghazi case following the 2012 attack by Islamic militants, believing that “terrorists went free” despite his disputed assertion that the Obama administration had enough evidence to charge even more people for the attack.

“I just got to my breaking point,” Patel once recalled. So in 2017, he left the Justice Department to become a senior investigator on Capitol Hill, where he helped lead the House Republicans’ probe of “Russiagate” — which, as he describes it, exposed FBI wrongdoing in its 2016 investigation of alleged ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.

‘Not a credible witness’

Patel’s work on the Russia probe led to him joining the Trump administration in 2019, and in the final year of Trump’s presidency he was appointed acting deputy director of national intelligence — the second-in-command of the entire U.S. intelligence community — and then chief of staff to the acting U.S. defense secretary, a position that critics claimed he was unqualified to hold even for just the 10 weeks he was there.

After Trump’s first administration ended, Patel regularly appeared on conservative media outlets, frequently praising Trump and criticizing the Justice Department for investigating and then prosecuting Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office and his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Patel has claimed — despite the Justice Department’s inspector general finding otherwise — that the FBI played a part in pushing pro-Trump protesters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he has claimed in media interviews and court testimony that Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserve blame for the attack — not Trump — because, Patel insists, Trump days earlier had authorized up to 20,000 National Guard to secure the Capitol.

The judge who listened to his court testimony in a case about Trump’s eligibility to be on Colorado’s ballot in the November election ruled that Patel “was not a credible witness,” saying his testimony was “not only illogical” but “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”

After Trump left office, Patel launched a tax-exempt charity, now known as the Kash Foundation, which made national headlines in 2023 with revelations that it provided thousands of dollars to at least two so-called “FBI whistleblowers” who helped House Republicans push disputed claims of corruption inside the Justice Department.

Patel has said his charity helps fund defamation lawsuits, supports whistleblowers, buys meals for families in need over Christmas, supports Jan. 6 families, and more recently funds “rescue operations” out of Israel.

But he has refused to offer specifics about who is benefiting from his charity, and, as ABC News previously reported, experts have questioned whether it was following the law. At the time, Patel declined to speak with ABC News about its reporting.

After Trump announced his latest presidential campaign, Patel traveled the country to promote Trump’s reelection, saying that Trump would fire “thousands and thousands and thousands” of government employees to root out the “Deep State.”

Three weeks after Trump was reelected president, he named Patel as his pick to lead the FBI.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s administration is filling one of the State Department’s top positions with a controversial conservative journalist who has promoted conspiracy theories related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and was fired as a speechwriter by the first Trump administration when it was revealed that he had spoken at a conference tied to White nationalists, sources familiar with the move told ABC News.

The sources said that the man, Darren Beattie, will now be the acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a so-called “Top 10” position that, as the State Department’s website describes it, “leads America’s public diplomacy outreach, which includes messaging to counter terrorism and violent extremism.”

“The Under Secretary oversees the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Global Public Affairs, and participates in foreign policy development,” the website adds.

Beattie is slated to start in the position on Monday, sources said. He was already serving in another senior role within the State Department, but the new move to such a high-level position has raised concerns among many of its employees, sources said.

More than two years ago, Beattie launched a right-wing media outlet called Revolver News, which has raised funds in part by selling pro-Trump apparel and merchandise.

“It’s OK to deny 2020,” reads two shirts still being sold on the outlet’s website. Another shirt promotes the refuted claim that Jan. 6, 2021, was an “FBI setup to frame Trump supporters as insurrectionists,” as the shirt says.

And Beattie has become a frequent guest on other right-wing media, often promoting conspiracy theories related to Jan. 6.

On Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast last month, Beattie repeated his claims that the FBI knows who’s behind the pipe bombs left at DNC and RNC offices on Jan. 6 but “what they found out was profoundly embarrassing to the government and to the narrative that the Biden regime wanted to promote, and so instead of following that investigation further, they basically just killed it,” Beattie said.

Beattie also claimed that surveillance video released by the FBI to seek help in identifying the perpetrator was “clearly tampered with.”

In mid-August 2018, he made national headlines, with the Washington Post reporting then that he “was terminated last week after revelations that he had spoken at a conference attended by well-known white nationalists” two years earlier.

According to the Washington Post, Beattie – who is Jewish – insisted that he was not racist and said in a statement.

“In 2016 I attended the [H.L. Mencken Club] conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled ‘The Intelligentsia and the Right.’ I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely,” the statement said. “It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent.”

At the end of the Trump administration, in November 2020, the Trump White House appointed Beattie to a three-year term with the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, which helps preserve sites related to the Holocaust.

The Anti-Defamation League strongly objected to the appointment, issuing a statement at the time saying, “It is absolutely outrageous that someone who has consorted with racists would even be considered for a position on a commission devoted to preserving Holocaust memorials in Europe.”

The New York Times then asked Beattie for comment, and he told the paper: “The ADL pretends to be an organization that protects Jews, but it really exists to protect Democrats. As a Jewish Trump supporter, I consider it an honor to be attacked by the far-left ADL and its disgraced leader, Jonathan Greenblatt.”

Asked about Beattie’s new position at the State Department, a White House spokesperson referred ABC News to the State Department. First reached on Friday, the State Department has so far not commented.

On Sunday, Beattie did not immediately respond to a request for comment by ABC News.

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