(Headline USA) FBI employees fired for their roles in the weaponized investigation of President Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida estate sued on Thursday to get their jobs back.
The complaint adds to the growing list of legal challenges to the mass terminations under FBI Director Kash Patel of agents who participated in investigations of the Republican president.
The suit was filed in federal court in Washington on behalf of nine agents, intelligence analysts and staff operations specialists who were fired in February following earlier dismissals of agents who had worked on the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Patel has said in congressional testimony that employees he has fired had “weaponized” the FBI. But the agents deny that claim in the lawsuit, noting that between them they had more than a century of distinguished and apolitical FBI service that involved responding to the Boston Marathon bombing, hostage recoveries and the investigation into the 2024 assassination attempt of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Their firings, the lawsuit says, create an “immeasurable loss” to “America’s national security.”
“In return for their service, they were fired because they did their jobs, as they always did to follow the facts and law without bias or favor. To this administration, this is an offense. To the rest of us, it is heroic,” said a statement from their attorneys, Margaret Donovan, Abbe Lowell and Rebecca Tinio.
“This lawsuit will prove their unlawful dismissal and hold the administration accountable for this blatant attack on the rule of law,” the statement added.
The suit lays out a detailed recitation of the allegations against Trump, describing how he improperly stored dozens of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, that he took with him after leaving the White House, showed them off to people not authorized to see them and obstructed FBI efforts to get them back.
The investigation resulted in a dramatic 2022 FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago that recovered classified records and later produced an indictment in federal court in Florida charging Trump with dozens of felony counts.
Trump denied wrongdoing, and the case was dismissed in 2024 by Judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled that the special counsel who filed the charges, Jack Smith, had been illegally appointed by the Biden administration Justice Department.
The nine fired FBI employees did not volunteer for the investigation but were rather assigned to it as part of their work on specialized counterintelligence and counterespionage squads, according to the lawsuit, which says they were nonetheless terminated because of perceptions that the performance of their law enforcement duties had run “afoul of the political and personal loyalty to Trump that Defendants demanded.”
“By casting Plaintiffs’ work on the Plasmic Echo investigation as ‘politically weaponized,’ Defendants incorrectly presumed to know the personal political convictions of Plaintiffs and took unlawful action based on that presumption,” the lawsuit says, using the FBI code name for the classified documents investigation. “Worse still, Defendants incorrectly concluded that those personal political convictions affected or drove their work.”
The lawsuit seeks, among other remedies, reinstatement to the FBI, an awarding of back pay and a court order declaring that the firings were unlawful.
The lawsuit notes how Patel, in his capacity as a conservative podcaster before becoming Trump’s FBI director, had derided the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search as “unlawful” and had accused the agents who had participated in it as being “corrupt government gangsters.”
Days after Trump was inaugurated, a top Justice Department official demanded that the FBI turn over a list of bureau employees who had participated in Trump-related investigations, an order that the then-director, Brian Driscoll, resisted and that was seen within the workforce as a potential prelude to mass firings.
Over the following year, the FBI and the Justice Department fired waves of employees involved in investigations of Trump.
The lawsuit says that the Mar-a-Lago agents and analysts were fired last February after Patel disclosed to Reuters that the FBI, as part of the investigation, had subpoenaed his toll records, which show the date, time and length of a phone call but not the content of the communications.
“The Plaintiffs were unlawfully terminated not for any cause or any legitimate reason, but only to satisfy the President’s personal vendetta,” the lawsuit states. “The firings did not follow any internal investigation or disciplinary process within the FBI, and Plaintiffs were not given any notice, a hearing, or an opportunity to appeal.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
