Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

17. Department of Justice · Notable

Review all active FBI investigations and terminate unlawful ones

Partially done

549 17. Department of Justice

“Conduct an immediate, comprehensive review of all major active FBI investigations and activities and terminate any that are unlawful or contrary to the national interest.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Working Group's second finding about FBI conduct: its report on Attorney General Garland's 2021-10-04 school-board memorandum, which says it fulfills the Attorney General's 2025-02-02 directive to review the memo and the report ordered by Executive Order 14147. It reports that the FBI opened twenty-five Guardian assessments of school-board threats and tagged seventeen 'EDUOFFICIALS', and that more than a dozen DOJ and FBI personnel objected to the memo at the time; the department will offer parents who were the subject of a Guardian the chance to review it and will add a disclaimer to those assessments. Still `partial`, for the same reason as 2026-08-27: the activity is from 2021 and long closed, so the review examined past activity rather than a major active investigation, and nothing records an active investigation terminated as unlawful.

  2. Partially done

    The Working Group published its first finding about FBI conduct: a report on the FBI Richmond Field Office's January 2023 Domain Perspective linking 'radical-traditionalist' Catholics to violent extremism, and the investigation of two priests behind it — one of the subjects the 2025-02-05 memorandum named. The report documents two Guardian assessments of the priests, opened in January 2023, and concludes that 'the FBI personnel involved in the creation of the Richmond Catholic Memo have been terminated from their positions'; the press release puts it as having 'removed key FBI personnel responsible'. Still `partial`: the memo was withdrawn and both assessments closed by the FBI itself in February 2023, so the review examined past activity rather than a major active investigation, and nothing records an active investigation terminated as unlawful.

  3. Partially done

    The Working Group published its first product, a report on FACE Act enforcement built from about 700,000 internal records, and the department dismissed three pending civil suits with prejudice. One line of inquiry closed; the comprehensive review of major active FBI investigations the Quote asks for is not among the published output.

  4. Partially done

    The Attorney General stood the review up as the Weaponization Working Group, led by the Office of the Attorney General and reporting quarterly to the White House. Its named subjects include FBI conduct — the January 2023 FBI memorandum treating certain Catholic religious practices as markers of violent extremism — alongside the Special Counsel investigations and the January 6 prosecutions. Machinery in place and running; no across-the-board audit of major active FBI investigations has been published, and nothing records investigations terminated as unlawful.

  5. Attempted

    Executive Order 14147 directed the Attorney General to review the activities of every department and agency exercising civil or criminal enforcement authority — the Justice Department and the FBI named among them — over the preceding four years, identify conduct contrary to the order's purposes, and report to the President with recommended remedial action. A directive to look; nothing had been reviewed or terminated.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

The review that exists is department-wide rather than FBI-specific: EO 14147 and the Weaponization Working Group reach every agency with enforcement authority, and the FBI appears in the Working Group’s subject list rather than as its object. No allowlisted source records a catalog of active FBI investigations or a termination decision on one. The Working Group’s second published report (2026-08-27, the Richmond Domain Perspective) is its first about the FBI, and it too concerns a closed, withdrawn product rather than an active investigation. The third, on the Garland school-board memo (2026-10-05, added in the fourteenth round’s review), is the same shape: Guardian assessments opened in 2021 and long closed.

Action
eliminate
Object
FBI investigations and activities
ID
1528