Tensions Over F.B.I.’s Work on Hamas Case Spill Into the Open

When the Justice Department demanded all the names of F.B.I. personnel who had worked on investigations into the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, it made a similar request about a high-profile terrorism case involving Hamas.

But why the department’s acting deputy leader, Emil Bove III, sought the information remained unclear, leaving agents and prosecutors to wonder what spurred his interest in a case that had led to criminal charges against Hamas’s leadership last year.

Its inclusion touched on a simmering dispute that has pitted the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s office in Washington against prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and the main Justice Department, people familiar with the investigation say, escalating what appeared to be bureaucratic infighting into an ugly public spat. It has intensified scrutiny on the F.B.I. as the Justice Department has made clear its intent to shake up the bureau.

“The Justice Department is looking into why F.B.I. agents at the Washington field office were resisting efforts to progress the Hamas investigation,” a Justice Department official said in an unusual public statement. “Federal prosecutors had to elevate their concerns to a supervisory level to get them to take the requested investigative steps.”

The F.B.I. declined to comment.

After Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Justice Department sought to investigate Hamas, a designated terrorist group, prompted in part by the sheer number of Americans who had been killed or kidnapped in the assault. Forty-seven Americans were slain while eight more were taken hostage in Gaza.

Tensions flared from the start, including over which office would take the lead.

The F.B.I.’s field office in Washington and prosecutors in the capital typically have jurisdiction over cases involving the Middle East and made clear they would pursue charges. But prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York quickly came up with their own charges against Hamas leaders based only on their public statements, three former senior law enforcement officials said, catching the F.B.I. off guard.

The F.B.I., in turn, was reluctant to take a crucial step to bringing a felony criminal complaint: having an agent sign an affidavit. The information in the complaint was already public and did not contain materials the bureau had collected during an investigation, the former officials said, prompting concerns over the strength of the case.

The two sides reached a détente: the Southern District of New York would handle investigating Hamas leaders and terrorism financing, and Washington investigators would scrutinize the kidnapping and killings of Americans abroad.

Several months later, Southern District prosecutors secretly filed a criminal complaint against top Hamas leaders that included Yahya Sinwar. Among the seven counts: conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens, conspiracy to finance terrorism, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction resulting in death and conspiracy to support terrorism resulting in death. Some of the counts date back to 1997.

The complaint was splashy, but mostly symbolic. The charges were largely a public accounting of Hamas’s brutal history over the decades, including bombings in the 1990s that killed Americans, as well as statements made by the Hamas officials singled out in the filing. But the F.B.I. agreed to have an agent put her name to the charges after the bureau was able to review them and make sure all the details were accurate.

The Justice Department unsealed the charges after Hamas killed Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American who had been badly wounded and taken hostage on Oct. 7. U.S. negotiators had held back, in part because they believed that making the charges public could complicate the possibility of a release.

Frustrations over the level of the F.B.I.’s involvement continued. Some officials at the Justice Department, including Matt Blue, who leads its counterterrorism section, were concerned over the resources and staffing the bureau had committed to bringing individual cases.

Mr. Blue traveled to Israel himself, to seek the cooperation of the authorities and to try to obtain evidence, including videos that the F.B.I. could use.

The field office in Washington, the second-largest in the F.B.I., was already juggling multiple priorities, including the Jan. 6 investigation and the two inquiries into Donald J. Trump led by the special counsel, Jack Smith. But although the extraterritorial squad designated to investigate the Hamas attack was busy and had other cases, it was generally unaffected by the other high-profile investigations, former officials said.

Some inside the F.B.I. would have liked to see the squad act with more urgency, one of the officials said, acknowledging that Israel’s first priority was fighting a war rather than assisting U.S. prosecutions.

Still, former and current officials said that the F.B.I.’s extraterritorial squad designated to investigate the Hamas attack had sent agents to Israel to gather evidence.

The priority for the F.B.I., some former officials said, was working on the hostage crisis, and there was an understanding that many of the Hamas officials linked to planning the attack and kidnappings likely would not survive the war.

Documenting crimes in war zones is extremely difficult. In places like Gaza, where crime scenes are easily obliterated, the challenge of collecting evidence makes prosecuting cases even harder.

In addition, when investigators gather evidence, it is not always clear they can use it in a court of law for a number of reasons, including establishing a chain of custody or the reluctance of a foreign partner to testify.

Investigating and charging these cases can take years. Finding, capturing and bringing people back to stand trial yield yet another immense set of complications.

Still, Hamas fighters were sending messages and videos on social media, which investigators could possibly to use to tie them to crimes against Americans. A former senior official said there was a strong desire to bring at least a couple of cases in which there was text and video implicating a Hamas militant.

It is not known how much information such as detainee interviews or video the Israeli government has provided to the F.B.I. and Justice Department, but the Israeli military has amassed petabytes of data about Hamas that its soldiers have collected in Gaza. One petabyte amounts to hundreds of billions of pages of documents or hours of video, which could take as long as 40 years to watch.

Israel has also made clear that it is bent on destroying Hamas. Of the five Hamas leaders charged in New York, three have been killed by Israel, including Mr. Sinwar. The remaining two are in Beirut and Qatar.

Mr. Bove has already moved to reshape the bureau, forcing out several F.B.I. executives, including the head of the Washington field office, David Sundberg, a well-respected agent who commanded the bureau’s elite hostage rescue team and ran a field office in Connecticut.

A top supervisor at the Washington field office who oversaw the squad working the Hamas cases also retired recently. He was well known for his crucial work on the 1988 bombing of an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. Others with knowledge of the case have left the bureau too. Former officials said Mr. Blue, who continues to oversee the counterterrorism section, had worked extensively with Mr. Bove when he was co-chief of the national security section in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

The Trump administration seems to be signaling to prosecutors in Washington that their primacy over Middle East cases may not last. On her first day as attorney general, Pam Bondi established an Oct. 7 task force to bring renewed vigor to the cases.

She also said her legislative office would push to change extraterritorial venue statutes.

The move could effectively take big national security cases away from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and hand them to its counterparts in New York, which has a rich tradition of prosecuting terrorism cases. Such changes would deal a blow to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which has already been upended by the dismissals of more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and an interim chief who is dismantling the bulk of their work.

Charlie Savage and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.