Trump Appoints Reactionary Agent, Private Spy, to Justice Department

Read our editorial on the ultra-reactionary Trump administration here.

A former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who once screamed “kill ’em!” at police officers during the January 6th riot at the Capitol has been elevated to a powerful advisory position in Donald Trump’s Justice Department (DOJ), marking the grotesque normalization of right-wing gangs and militias by the State under the banner of law and order.

Jared L. Wise, once a federal agent and later an operative of the reactionary smear machine Project Veritas, a reactionary nongovernment surveillance program that tracks progressive activists and organizations, has been tasked with advising the so-called “weaponization working group”—a political body under Trump’s direct control tasked with rooting out judges that issue judicial rulings that restrain or halt Trump’s use of executive orders.

When Trump took office in January 2025, Wise was still being prosecuted by the Biden administration’s DOJ. Facing multiple felony and misdemeanor charges for his role in the riot, he plead not guilty. His prosecution was among dozens abruptly dismissed in one of Trump’s first acts after assuming the presidency—his mass clemency order for all January 6 defendants.

Reactionary Escalation

His appointment is part and parcel of the further reactionization of the State through Trump’s ongoing attempts to increase the concentration of power in the executive branch while cleaning up the judiciary institutions of opponents who permit some protections for immigrants and activists. Trump’s objective is to subject the legislature (both the House and the Senate) and the judiciary to the decisions of the president.

Through Congress, Trump is moving to formalize the limitations of judges making nationwide injunctions on his executive orders, to defund parts of the judiciary, and decrease the number of judgeships in total.

The Democrats have used this to bolster false claims that Trump is attempting a non-constitutional takeover or coup, even though they themselves have bolstered this similar trend toward maximizing the strength of the executive branch. Biden demonstrated just as Trump has that expansion of presidential powers was the rule of the day: not only continuing many of Trump’s emergency declarations and executive orders from his first term, but also opening the presidency to shut down the border for immigrants and summarily expel certain categories of immigrants, using executive powers for legal clemency for his own political ends, and also expelling members of the state bureaucracy when they don’t serve his purpose.

Wise as Imperialist Spy

When Wise was an FBI agent he worked on public corruption and “counterterrorism” out of the FBI field offices in Washington and New York, later joining Project Veritas under the supervision of former MI6 British spy Richard Seddon. Wise was then detailed to Occupied Palestine, where he was put in charge of advising the Palestinian Authority (PA), the traitorous group that currently exercises governmental functions in the West Bank and internally polices its own people on behalf of the Israeli occupation and US imperialism. He was then transferred to Libya, where shortly thereafter, he was fired after his performance reportedly declined.

Now, Wise is back in a position of influence—this time to help remold the DOJ as a tool to bring state bureaucracies, federal agencies, and especially the judiciary to serve the reactionary aims of the Trump administration and to engage in corrupt pardons for political favors.

Wise’s appointment isn’t mere dysfunction—it is the ongoing reactionization of the State to serve the arch-reactionary section of the bourgeoisie under President Trump, which increasingly turns to open “shock and awe” violence in addition to low-intensity counterinsurgency.

Photo: Jared L. Wise at the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot. Credit: Department of Justice.

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