Nine former FBI employees involved in the classified documents case against President Donald Trump filed suit Thursday against FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche, alleging their firings were “unlawful.”
The group’s lawsuit says they were fired without cause for their work on the case involving Trump, and that the firings appeared to be politically motivated. He noted that they were deported while Patel was criticized by the administration for partying with the U.S. Olympic hockey team.
FBI Special Agent Miles Starr, who worked a unit called the “Director’s Advisory Team,” ostensibly formed to investigate Trump’s alleged political enemies, had demanded urgent access to the “Plasma Echo” file — the code name for the investigation into the classified documents affair — on Feb. 23, the lawsuit says. This was after a video of Patel drinking a beer and “throwing alcohol in the locker room of the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, began circulating widely on social media and news sites,” the suit states.
The file contained the names of the agents who had worked on the investigation, and they were summarily fired over the next few days without any required due process, the complaint states.
“Each plaintiff received a termination letter signed by Director Patel” that falsely claimed they had demonstrated “poor judgment and lack of impartiality in the performance of their duties, leading to a political militarization of government,” the suit states.
Patel later told Congress they were fired for cause and, after an internal investigation, the suit’s claims were false.
NBC News has contacted the FBI and the Justice Department for comment.
The file says former employees “did not volunteer to participate in Plasmic Echo; they were assigned to the case because they were members of specific FBI counterintelligence and intelligence squads” and the nine “carried out their duties in an apolitical manner.”
Other cases the group’s members worked on included the Boston Marathon bombing and the investigation of Trump’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The plaintiffs, Jennifer Bacon, Zach Feldman, Gilbert Granados, Catherine Herrera, Harrison Kaufman, Jeremy Linton, Erin Matanic, Danielle Ray and Rachel Vaccaro, have among them “more than a century of experience and service at the FBI” and have been “involved in numerous high-profile investigations to thwart threats and respond to crises and attacks against the United States,” the complaint says, and their sudden dismissals haven’t affected just them.
The nine individuals were “involved in sensitive and ongoing counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations in connection with threats emanating from countries around the world,” the filing said.
“As a result of their unlawful and hasty terminations, plaintiffs’ investigations were not properly transferred to other FBI special agents or analysts,” it says. “The impacts of these reckless actions on American national security are immeasurable. »
The group’s attorneys, Margaret Donovan, Abbe D. Lowell and Rebecca S. Tinio, said in a joint statement that the suit would prove their clients were illegally fired and hold the Trump administration accountable for “this egregious attack on the rule of law.”
The agents 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,” the lawyers said in their statement.
The agents’ investigation helped lead to the then-former president being indicted in June 2023 on allegations that he lied and conspired to deceive federal investigators to keep sensitive documents that he knew were still classified after he left the White House.
The indictment alleged that the documents he took with him “included information regarding the defense and weapons capabilities of the United States and foreign countries; the nuclear programs of the United States; the potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. »
Trump was later accused of trying to obstruct the investigation. He pleaded not guilty to all charges and the case was ultimately dismissed after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, found that the special counsel who led the investigation, Jack Smith, was inappropriately appointed.
A Justice Department appeal against the decision was dropped after Trump’s 2024 re-election.
The lawsuit says it was clear that employees who worked on investigations involving Trump were “condemned” because he and other senior government officials “made it clear in numerous public statements that they intended to retaliate against anyone deemed by Trump to have wronged him.”
“Before and after Plaintiffs’ termination, President Trump, Defendant Patel, Defendant Blanche, and others in Trump’s orbit publicly impugned Plaintiffs’ integrity, despite their impeccable service records; defamed their work as politically motivated when it was not; and made clear that their fate was sealed simply because they worked on an investigation into Trump’s wrongdoing,” the complaint reads.
The lawsuit says Starr, the person who accessed the file, was also involved in the first indictment of FBI Director James Comey last year, a case that was ultimately dismissed and that Comey’s team believes was politically motivated.
The lawsuit seeks to have the employees reinstated to their jobs and given back pay for the time they missed.
A similar lawsuit was filed earlier this year by two former FBI special agents who said they were wrongly fired for what they described as their minimal role in “Arctic Frost,” Smith’s investigation into the alleged criminal plot to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges in the case, which were dismissed after his election victory due to the Justice Department’s long-standing policy that sitting presidents cannot face federal charges.
The Justice Department has decided to dismiss the lawsuit, which is ongoing.
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