WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI employees fired for their roles in investigating President Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida property sued Thursday to get their jobs back, calling their firings illegal acts of “political retaliation.”
The complaint adds to a growing list of legal challenges to mass firings under FBI Director Kash Patel of agents who participated in investigations of the Republican president or are seen as opposed to the Trump administration’s interests.
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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 worked on the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Patel said in congressional testimony that the employees he 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, apolitical service to the FBI, involving the response to the Boston Marathon bombing, hostage recovery and the investigation of Trump’s 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
According to the lawsuit, their layoffs create an “immeasurable loss” to “America’s national security.”
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“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 lawsuit 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 leaving the White House, showed them to people not authorized to see them and obstructed the FBI’s efforts to recover them.
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The investigation culminated in a dramatic FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 that recovered classified documents and later produced an indictment in federal court in Florida accusing Trump of dozens of counts.
Trump denied any wrongdoing, and the case was dismissed in 2024 by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, who ruled that the special counsel who filed the complaint, Jack Smith, was 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 their clients’ “fate was sealed” well before the February layoffs, making the layoffs the culmination of a long campaign of retaliation that began once Trump returned to the White House in 2025.
The lawsuit notes how Patel, in his capacity as a conservative podcaster before becoming Trump’s FBI director, had ridiculed the FBI’s search at Mar-a-Lago as “illegal” and accused the agents who participated in it of being “corrupt government gangsters.”
Days after Trump’s inauguration, a senior Justice Department official 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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