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Multiple former and current DOJ and FBI officials are considering hiring lawyers “in anticipation of being criminally investigated” by the incoming Trump administration, three people with knowledge of their deliberations told NBC News.

The preemptive initiative underscores a serious belief that President-elect Donald Trump will make good on his promise to purge the federal government of rogue and corrupt actors within the administrative state.

Last week, Trump transition adviser Mark Paoletta warned DOJ career attorneys that subverting, undermining, or sabotaging Trump’s incoming agenda will be cause for termination.

Paoletta cited examples of potential policies the DOJ might have to implement, such as deporting illegal aliens, securing the southern border, banning race-based affirmative action, investigating antisemitism, halting big tech censorship, and granting pardons and commutations to January 6 defendants.

“Everything we did was aboveboard,” a former senior FBI official  alleged on NBC News. “But this is a different world.”

Some career Justice Department officials cried after Trump won the election, according to the report, due to the realization that Trump would likely try to rid the administrative state of a cesspool of corruption.

The term “administrative state” describes the phenomenon of unaccountable and unelected administrative agencies, including the national security  apparatus, exercising power to create and enforce their own rules. The administrative state uses its rule-making ability to essentially usurp the separation of powers between the three branches of government by creating a so-called fourth branch of government not formed by the Constitution.

In October 2021 Trump signed an executive order (EO) to reclassify federal government employees into Schedule F, which would have allowed the president to enhance accountability, including job performance accountability, within the bureaucratic agencies. “You have some people that are protected that shouldn’t be protected,” Trump said in April about Schedule F.

President Joe Biden canceled the order in 2021, but with Trump’s victory, he could reimplement the executive order and purge the unelected technocrats artificially running the federal government. “It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy,” Axios concluded in 2022 about the EO’s potential impact.

Many unelected bureaucrats within the administrative state use their position to inflict their own agenda on citizens. For instance, before the “laptop from hell” story broke in 2020, 51 intel officials signed a letter that insinuated Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Politico peddled the letter under the title “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The 51 signatories, however, seemingly knew the Politico story was false at the time because the FBI had the laptop that Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. President Joe Biden cited the story during a 2020 presidential debate with Trump to discredit the laptop’s contents. The story was reportedly planted by now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken for Biden to use during the event.

Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.