Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Mel, when we begin with breaking news.

New reporting on a partisan purge, a plan to politicize the FBI.

This involves Donald Trump, and I'm going to show you exactly what's happening.

But the first thing to know is this breaks with history and precedent. It is not normal. It is not standard. And it is not part of the other

traditional and even expected personnel moves that you have between administrations. You may have

heard the term political appointee and our coverage of these hearings. That's all standard.

What's not standard and what could be a Friday night sort of

news dump, an effort to hide something that Donald Trump doesn't want you to see on the news tonight,

is this. Top, nonpartisan and career FBI officials basically being pushed in a so-called purge to

resign or face firing.

Agents who were involved in investigations of MAGA,

of the crime spree that was well documented on January 6th and related investigations that also touched on Donald Trump's role.

They are being told, as the AP reports,

that they'll be moved to fire those agents involved in that.

A letter was sent to agents, quote, given your significant role in prosecuting the president, a reference to when they were investigating the former president, the FBI actually does not prosecute, although it gathers the evidence therefore.

Quote, I do not believe the leadership of the department can trust you

to assist in implementing the president's agenda faithfully. The New York Times reports this could

affect hundreds of career agents. We're talking about the nonpartisan people who keep the country safe,

and we're talking about expertise that's used to deal with crime fighting from national security,

terror investigations, the immigration

issues that the administration has said they care about. This is a gutting of that for allegedly

political reasons. NBC's Kandelanian reports, this is also national targeting over 20 heads of

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