WASHINGTON — A senior FBI official who was pushed out by the Trump administration last year was expected to announce Monday that he is running for Congress in Maryland, portraying himself as a champion of the rule of law who wants to hold President Donald Trump accountable.

David Sundberg, 56, oversaw the FBI’s Washington Field Office from January 2023 until January 2025, when the Trump administration forced him and seven other senior leaders to resign. The move, days after Trump was sworn in, proved to be the first in a series of purges.

In an interview, Sundberg said he had decided to run for Congress as he grew dismayed at how Trump was directing the FBI and Justice Department to investigate and prosecute his perceived political enemies.

“I’m running to uphold the oath I took at the beginning of my career — an oath that didn’t change when the Trump administration forced me out of the federal government,” he said. “During that career, I worked to ensure that no one was above the law. And over the last year, we’ve seen some terrible abuses against the people of the United States.”

In his year out of government, Sundberg said he helped other law enforcement officials who were fired or left under pressure, connecting them with lawyers and services that would scrub the internet of personal information and assist with security, “because of the increased levels of political violence.”

Sundberg, a former member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, which frequently deploys overseas, has mostly lived in the greater Washington area since 2005. He moved to North Beach, in Maryland’s 5th District, in 2024, he said.

In January 2023, Sundberg took over the Washington Field Office, putting him in charge of two FBI squads assisting Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted Trump. The investigations centered on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after he left office. Smith dropped both cases after Trump won the 2024 election.

Sundberg will face a steep challenge in the Democratic primary, where he is joining an already crowded field for an open seat in a solidly Democratic district. It has been represented since 1981 by Rep. Steny Hoyer, a longtime party leader who is retiring after decades in Congress.

His candidacy also adds to the growing number of former federal law enforcement officials who left government last year and are running for office. In their campaigns, they are promoting their clashes with the Trump administration and their objections to its use of their former agencies.

J.P. Cooney, a former top deputy to Smith, is seeking a House seat in Virginia. Cooney was also summarily fired in January 2025 by the Trump administration.

Ryan Crosswell and Zach Dembo, two other Justice Department prosecutors who quit last year over what they have characterized as the politicization of the department under Trump, are seeking House seats in Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

And Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who helped defend the Capitol from a mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, has also said he would seek the Democratic nomination for Maryland’s 5th District.

Sundberg was born in Massachusetts and grew up in New Hampshire, where he finished college. He later earned a master’s in business administration from Fordham University. He and his wife of 32 years have two adult children.

He enlisted in the Air Force after college, then became a police officer. He became an FBI agent in 2002.

Sundberg said he believed voters had “real anger and disappointment that Congress has not acted as a check on presidential power.” He added that he intended to cast his experience at the FBI as putting him in a “unique position” to perform serious oversight of what he described as abuses by Trump of his power over law enforcement agencies.

“If I were still in the bureau, I would be fighting these battles from the inside to protect against the abuses of politicized federal law enforcement agencies,” he said. “But since I can no longer protect the American people and uphold the Constitution as a law enforcement officer, I plan to do it as a legislator.”

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Charlie Savage/Carolyn Van Houten
c. 2026  The New York Times Company