In the decades after 9/11, the FBI was granted sweeping new powers that transformed the Bureau's role in American life. As political extremism and conspiracy culture spread, the FBI found itself confronting threats difficult to separate from the fears animating America itself.
That same domestic security apparatus would eventually become entangled in America's political crises. After returning to the White House, President Donald Trump replaced the FBI's leadership with loyalists, pushing the Bureau to a more openly political role and leaving one of the world's most powerful law enforcement agencies vulnerable to the authoritarian forces now reshaping the country.
Award-winning investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson traces a fractured nation where perceived enemies have only multiplied, and where the Bureau itself may have become one. Through a series of interlocking stories spanning two decades, he follows figures caught between their own search for meaning and the government's need to identify threats: a convert who journeys from the United States to the battlefields of Syria; an informant paid to push a plot he cannot control; former FBI agents consumed by institutional distrust; and Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist who rises to lead the Bureau itself.
As Aaronson finds himself drawn into the very story he set out to report, Bad Guys reveals how the FBI's search for enemies helped drive America toward extremism.
