In the years following 9/11, the FBI was granted sweeping new powers that transformed its role. As extremism and conspiracy culture spread, the Bureau became the most powerful- and least accountable-domestic intelligence operation in American history.
But an institution that treats everyone as a threat will see enemies everywhere. The two decades of surveillance and entrapment that followed bred distrust, leaving the Bureau vulnerable to capture by the authoritarian forces now weaponizing it.
Enter Donald Trump, who, after returning to the White House, soon replaces the FBI's leadership with his own loyalists, including Kash Patel, an outsider and conspiracy theorist who rapidly rises to take overall command.
In Bad Guys, investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson reveals a fractured nation where the enemies list never stops growing. Through a series of interlocking stories spanning twenty years, he follows a convert whose search for belonging ends on the battlefield in Syria; an informant paid to set up his friend, then left to live with the consequences; agents who once believed in the FBI's mission now watching it curdle; and charts, in granular detail, the improbable rise of Kash Patel.
A searing work of non-fiction set against the American drift towards extremism, Bad Guys shows how, even as it was built to find enemies, the new FBI is becoming one itself.