By ADAM GOLDMAN, WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM, MAGGIE HABERMAN and GLENN THRUSH NYTimes News Service
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The top agent at the FBI’s New York field office vowed in a defiant email to his staff to “dig in” after the Trump administration targeted officials involved in the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack — and praised the bureau’s interim leaders for defending its independence.

“Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy,” wrote James E. Dennehy, a veteran and highly respected agent who has run the largest and arguably the most important field office in the bureau since September.

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Dennehy, through a representative in New York, declined to comment.

The email, viewed by The New York Times, came after the Justice Department ordered the FBI on Friday to collect the names of bureau personnel who helped investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, raising the possibility that President Donald Trump’s political appointees plan to purge career bureau officials, including rank-and-file field agents. That number could reach 6,000 — or about a sixth of the bureau’s 38,000 employees, according to the FBI.

At least nine high-ranking officials have been forced out since Trump’s inauguration, plunging the bureau into confusion. Dennehy wrote that those removals had spread “fear and angst within the F.B.I. ranks.”

That sense of dread was stoked by a remarkable questionnaire sent to bureau employees, asking them to describe what, if any, role they had in investigating and prosecuting Jan. 6 rioters.

The form requires the employees to say if they collected evidence, provided support services, interviewed witnesses, executed search warrants or testified at trial — basic activities of FBI employees during the normal and lawful course of their duties. They have until 3 p.m. Monday to complete the forms.

Dennehy urged his employees to remain calm and not to make any rushed decisions about their careers as he committed to providing assistance to them no matter what happened. He also suggested he had no intention of stepping down.

“Time for me to dig in,” he wrote.

In an extraordinary gesture, Dennehy, a former Marine, praised the two top acting officials at the FBI, Brian Driscoll and Robert C. Kissane, for “fighting” for the bureau’s employees. Both resisted efforts to immediately oust career employees, and they pushed for a formal review process to delay or mitigate the disruption, according to people familiar with the situation.

“They are warriors,” he said of those who pushed back on broad dismissals of FBI personnel across the bureau, according to people directly familiar with the matter.

Such is the uncertainty at the FBI that some bureau leaders have felt compelled to email colleagues to say they have not been removed.

“I know a lot of you have seen or heard reports that F.B.I. executives have been asked to resign or be fired,” the top agent in Seattle wrote Friday in a message viewed by the Times. “To clarify my own status, as of this writing I have not been fired or asked to resign, nor have I received any indication I might be.”

On Saturday, the FBI issued an unusual statement reassuring the workforce that Driscoll was still the acting director. And Dennehy, in his email, also pushed back on rumors that anyone had been removed outside the small group of officials already known to have been ousted.

Dennehy’s office has roughly 1,100 agents and about 500 task officers, who are police investigators and law enforcement officers from other federal agencies assigned to work with the FBI.