(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 contest the 2020 election.
Patel has said in congressional testimony that employees he has fired had “weaponized” the FBI. Agents deny that claim in the lawsuit.
The nine fired FBI employees said they did not volunteer for the classified documents investigation, but were rather assigned to it as part of their work on specialized counterintelligence and counterespionage squads.
“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 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.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
