Velsky starts now.

Hey, good morning. Sunday, February 2nd, Groundhog Day, as you know, day 13 of the second

Trump administration. And we begin this morning with brand new developments in the Trump

administration's ongoing purge of career FBI officials. For the past

couple of weeks, we've been following the distressing changes happening across every level of the

federal government as Donald Trump's new administration aggressively tests the limits of its power.

But within the federal government, across the country, there are still people who are holding the line.

Since the new administration stepped in, federal workers have been demoted, transferred, forced out.

They've even been offered a deal if they agree to a deferred resignation.

One federal employee with whom NBC News recently spoke even described it as, quote, psychological warfare. It's all part of the president's

plan to clean house and purge civil servants from the government so that they can remake the

bureaucracy to suit their needs. It's exactly what President Trump campaigned on and what he promised

he would do if he won the second term in the White House. And those plans were all laid out in

the open as outlined in the

pages of Project 2025. On Friday, Trump administration officials forced out eight senior executives

from the FBI as part of a larger purge of employees within the Department of Justice.

But NBC News has learned that the acting FBI director, Brian Driscoll, forcefully resisted carrying out the order to dismiss agents involved in the January 6th investigations, to the point that some feared that the Trump administration would fire Driscoll as well.

Driscoll holds the position of FBI director temporarily.

He's the head of the FBI's field office in Newark, who was elevated to the position

after FBI director Chris Ray and his deputy both resigned ahead of Trump's inauguration.

They were both going to be fired by Trump anyway.

In a message that was shared widely within FBI circles, one agent summarized it this way.

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