Hi, everyone, happy Friday. It's Fort Clark in New York. We meet at the end of a week

today punctuated by a reality check and a real window on how our institutions are meeting

this moment, how therewithstanding the pressure from the new president

and the new Trump administration. We're talking about news today of a bit of a reprieve

for the men and women of the FBI, agents who had been forced to fill out a rather ominous

questionnaire that detailed their involvement in any way, in any of the January 6 cases.

Men and women of the FBI, who then learned that the Justice Department was leaning on FBI leadership to hand over those names.

The demand FBI leadership first refused to comply with and instead turned over ID numbers.

The men and women of the FBI who woke up this morning then to the news that after all that,

acting FBI director Brian Driscoll, in effect, blinked in the standoff at the Justice Department

and did in fact turn over the full names of every FBI agent who worked on any January 6th case.

To put it bluntly, this was unnerving,

just because of the risk it poses to the men and women of the FBI and their families,

but also because of what it says about the current strength of our institutions,

of that institution.

But what happens next is arguably just as important and instructive. Within hours of news that the

names of all the FBI agents who worked on January 6 cases had been turned over to the Justice

Department, there was another development. We learned this, quote, the Trump administration has

agreed to keep private a list of FBI employees who worked on January 6 cases unless it first

provides a two-day head start for the employees to seek a court's intervention. The agreement

between the FBI agents association and Donald Trump's Justice Department de-escalates for now

a showdown between the Bureau and the Department of Justice.

...