WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI employees fired for their role in the investigation into the affair of President Donald Trump preservation of classified documents at his Florida property, filed a lawsuit Thursday to get their jobs back, calling their firings illegal acts of “political retaliation.”
The complaint is added to the growing list of legal challenges to the mass firings under FBI Director Kash Patel of agents who participated in investigations into the Republican president or who are considered opposed to the interests of the Trump administration.
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 the earlier firing of agents who had worked on the investigation into Trump’s efforts to spill his defeat in the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Patel said in congressional testimony that employees he fired had ‘armed’ themselves the FBI. But the agents deny that claim in the lawsuit, noting that between them they had more than a century of distinguished, apolitical service to the FBI, which included responding to the Boston Marathon bombinghostage recoveries and investigation into Trump’s assassination attempt in 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
According to the lawsuit, their layoffs create an “immeasurable loss” to “America’s national security.”
“In exchange for their service, they were fired because they did their job, as they always have, following the facts and the law without bias or favor. For this administration, it is an offense. For the rest of us, it is heroic,” their lawyers, Margaret Donovan, Abbe Lowell and Rebecca Tinio, said in a statement.
“This trial will prove their unlawful termination and hold the administration accountable for this egregious attack on the rule of law,” the statement added.
Mar-a-Lago investigation results in criminal charges against Trump
The suit presents a detailed account of the allegations against Trump, describing how he improperly stored dozens of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, which he took with him after leave the White Houseshowed them to people not authorized to see them and obstructed the FBI’s efforts to recover them.
An aerial view of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is seen August 10, 2022 in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)
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The survey resulted in a dramatic 2022 FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago who recovered classified documents and then filed an indictment in a Florida federal court charging Trump with dozens of counts.
This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of files stored in a bathroom and shower in the Lake Room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. (Justice Department via AP)
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Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and the case was closed in 2024 by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, who ruled that the special counsel who filed the complaint, Jack Smithhad been illegally appointed by the Biden administration’s Justice Department.
The nine fired FBI employees did not volunteer for the investigation but were instead assigned to it as part of their work in specialized counterintelligence and counterintelligence squads, according to the lawsuit, which says they were nonetheless fired due to baseless perceptions that the performance of their law enforcement duties had been “contrary to the political and personal loyalty to Trump demanded by the defendants.”
“By characterizing Plaintiffs’ work in the plasma echo investigation as ‘politically weaponized,’ Defendants falsely presumed knowledge of Plaintiffs’ personal political beliefs and took unlawful actions based on that presumption,” the lawsuit says, using the FBI’s code name for the classified materials investigation. “Even worse, defendants wrongly concluded that these personal political beliefs affected or motivated their work. »
The lawsuit seeks, among other remedies, reinstatement to the FBI, an award of back pay and a court order declaring the firings unlawful.
Lawsuit says firings were culmination of retaliatory campaign
Lawyers for the fired employees suggest that their clients’ “fate was sealed” well before the February layoffs, casting the firings as the culmination of a long campaign of retaliation that began once Trump is back in the White House in 2025.
The lawsuit notes how Patel, in his capacity as a conservative podcaster before becoming Trump’s FBI director, called the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid “illegal” and accused the agents who participated in it of being “corrupt government gangsters.”
A few days after Trump’s inauguration, a senior official from the Ministry of Justice demanded that the FBI turn over a list of bureau employees who had participated in Trump-related investigations, an order that then-director Brian Driscoll resisted and was seen among staff as a potential prelude to mass layoffs.
Over the next year, the FBI and Justice Department fired waves of employees involved in the Trump investigations without hearings or notice, which plaintiffs’ lawyers say is required by law.
The lawsuit says Mar-a-Lago agents and analysts were fired last February after Patel revealed to Reuters that the FBI, as part of the investigation, had subpoenaed its records, which show the date, time and duration of a phone call but not the content of the communications.
“Plaintiffs were unlawfully terminated, not for any lawful cause or reason, but solely to satisfy the President’s personal vendetta,” the lawsuit states. “The terminations did not follow any internal investigation or disciplinary proceedings within the FBI, and the plaintiffs received no notice, hearing, or opportunity to appeal.”
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