FBI employees involved in Trump classified documents case sue over ‘unlawful’ firings

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 suit says they were fired without cause for their work on the case involving Trump, and that the firings appeared to be politically motivated. It noted they were booted while Patel was being criticized by the administration for partying with the U.S. Olympic hockey team. FBI Special Agent Miles Starr, who was working in a unit called the “Director’s Advisory Team” that was apparently formed to look into Trump’s perceived political enemies, had demanded urgent access to the “Plasmic Echo” case file — the code name for the investigation into the classified documents case — on Feb. 23, the lawsuit says. That was after video of Patel chugging a beer and “flinging alcohol around the U.S. men’s hockey team’s locker room at the Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, began circulating widely on social media and news sites,” the suit says. The file had the names of the agents who’d worked on the investigation, and they were summarily fired over the next few days without any of the required due process, the suit says. “Each Plaintiff was provided with a termination letter signed by Director Patel” that falsely claimed that they had exercised “poor judgment and a lack of impartiality in carrying out their duties, leading to the political weaponization of the government,” the suit says. Patel later told Congress they were fired for cause and after internal investigations, claims the suit says are not true. NBC News has reached out to the FBI and the Justice Department for comment. The filing says the 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 “performed their duties apolitically.” Among the other cases members of the group had worked on were the Boston Marathon bombing and the investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump 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 “over a century of experience and service to the FBI” among them and were “involved in numerous high-profile investigations to thwart threats and respond to crises and attacks against the United States,” the suit says, and their abrupt firings affected more than just them. The nine were “involved in ongoing and sensitive counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations in connection with threats emanating from countries across the globe,” the filing says. “As a result of their unlawful and hasty firings, Plaintiffs’ investigations were not properly transferred to other FBI Special Agents or Analysts,” it says. “The impacts of these heedless actions on America’s national security is 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 unlawfully fired and hold the Trump administration accountable for “this blatant attack on the rule of law.” The agents were dismissed “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,” the lawyers’ statement said. The agents’ investigation helped lead to the then-former president being charged in June 2023 on allegations that he lied and schemed to mislead federal investigators to retain sensitive materials 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 defense and weapons capabilities of both the U.S. and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for a possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” Trump was later charged with trying to obstruct the investigation. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and the case was ultimately dismissed after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, found the special counsel who led the investigation, Jack Smith, had been appointed improperly. A Justice Department appeal of that ruling was dropped after Trump was re-elected in 2024. The lawsuit says it was clear that employees who’d worked on investigations involving Trump were “doomed” because he and other top government officials “made clear in numerous public statements that they intended to exact revenge against anyone Trump deemed to have wronged him.” “Before and after Plaintiffs’ firings, President Trump, Defendant Patel, Defendant Blanche, and others in Trump’s orbit publicly impugned Plaintiffs’ integrity, despite their unimpeachable service records; smeared their work as politically motivated, when it was not; and made clear that their fate was sealed by virtue of simply having worked on an investigation into Trump’s wrongdoing,” the complaint reads. The lawsuit notes Starr, the person who accessed the case 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 has said was politically motivated. The suit seeks to have the employees reinstated to their jobs and awarded back pay for the time they’ve missed. A similar lawsuit was filed earlier this year by two former FBI special agents who said they were wrongfully fired for what they described as their minimal roles in “Arctic Frost,” Smith’s investigation into the alleged criminal conspiracy to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges in that case, which were dismissed after his election victory due to long-standing Justice Department policy stating that sitting presidents can’t face federal charges. The Justice Department has moved to dismiss that lawsuit, which is pending.