‘THEY WERE HIRING IDIOTS’: FBI Agent Explains How DEI Split The Agency and Led to Disaster

Leftist rule hollowed out once-great institutions and turned them against the American people.

Former FBI special agent Nicole Parker says the bureau was torn apart by DEI ideology, creating what she calls “two FBIs”: one focused on merit, integrity, and protecting the public, and another consumed by identity politics, quotas, and performative priorities.

In her new book, The Two FBIs, Parker describes how, beginning under Barack Obama and accelerating under Joe Biden, hiring standards deteriorated as diversity targets overtook competence and mission readiness. Under FBI Director Christopher Wray, she says morale collapsed and unqualified recruits were brought in to satisfy DEI quotas.

Parker—who worked major violent crime, human trafficking, and active shooter cases—links this cultural shift directly to operational failure. She recounts how, in the lead-up to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, leadership attention was focused on diversity events rather than acting on credible tips. She believes lives may have been lost because competence and training were subordinated to DEI priorities.

After 12 years with the bureau, Parker left in 2022, concluding that the FBI she joined no longer existed. Her account portrays an agency hollowed out by ideology—less capable, more politicized, and increasingly unable to fulfill its core mission of protecting the American people.

Former FBI agent Nicole Parker explains how DEI split the agency and led to disaster: ‘They were hiring idiots’

By Doree Lewak, NY Post, Dec. 31, 2025:

President Trump’s heralded decision to make DEI DOA couldn’t come a moment too soon for Nicole Parker.

The so-called diversity, equity and inclusion initiative was a boondoggle that wrought incalculable damage across every sphere of employment in the country.

No one knows that better than Parker, a former FBI special agent of 12 years who described how a civil war brewed inside the once-venerable agency, with “lines drawn” between two clashing factions she termed “FBI 1 versus FBI 2.”

One side represents “integrity, meritocracy and protecting the American people” while the other force pushes “personal agendas and identity politics, DEI and politically motivated cases” in lieu of serious crime investigations and “the upholding of law and order replaced by performative posturing.”

By the time she left Wall Street to join the FBI in 2010 at age 32, Parker writes in her new book, “The Two FBIs: The Bravery and Betrayal I Saw In My Time At the Bureau,” that she saw segments of the bureau “becoming increasingly obsessed with diversity,” with breathless announcements about new clubs, meetings and “other diversity events.”

A mere three years later, Parker described the newly formed “Office of Diversity and Inclusion” and “Diversity Advisory Committee” and by 2015, “diversity” was added as a core value of the bureau — which she claimed had nothing to do with “protecting the US from terrorist attacks” and combating threats that should have been priorities at the heart of the agency.

While standards “deteriorated” during the era of President Barack Obama and bureau Director James Comey, Parker claimed, under President Joe Biden and Director Christopher Wray “it really amped it up” and “morale took a serious hit.”

“Under the Biden administration, they were hiring idiots,” Parker bluntly claimed to The Post. “Hiring standards dropped and it was noticeable, lowering the standards to meet quotas.”

It was all part of an insidious apparatus that degraded the agency to which she devoted more than a decade of her life.

In addition to being the agent in charge of the Parkland school shooting for the bureau, doing the death notifications, Parker worked high-profile investigations, specializing in human trafficking, violent crimes, active shooting situations and manhunts — until, after much soul-searching, she ultimately walked away in October 2022.

Days before the Parkland, Florida, high school massacre that saw 17 students and staff killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parker described a diversity event at the bureau — and how Wray’s priority seemed to be on that, rather than taking tips.

“I had to tell shattered parents that their child was dead when it could have been stopped,” she told The Post.

“My blood was boiling. What if instead of focusing so much time and energy on diversity, such as the Diversity Agent Recruitment (DAR) event that Director Wray had attended nine days before, only twenty-seven miles south of the Parkland killing spree location, he had prioritized hiring the best and brightest and making sure that they were properly trained to know how to document a tip that might have saved seventeen lives?

“In my mind, the improper prioritization of diversity might have cost those lives,” she writes.

For Parker — a Texas native and former hedge fund exec who was traumatized by witnessing 9/11 from the World Financial Center (Brookfield Place) — it was a tale of two FBIs, essentially one good, one sinister.

The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, D.C., with two American flags flying on its facade.

Continued……