WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI employees fired for their roles in the investigation of President Donald Trump's retention of classified documents at his Florida estate sued Thursday to get their jobs back, calling their terminations unlawful acts of “political retribution.”
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 or are seen as opposed to Trump administration interests.
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 overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Patel has said in congressional testimony that the fired employees had “weaponized” the FBI and that terminations at the bureau follow internal investigations that turn up inappropriate conduct. But the agents deny that claim in the lawsuit, noting that that they were fired without any investigation, notice or hearing. They said that between them they had more than a century of distinguished and apolitical FBI service that involved responding to the Boston Marathon bombing, hostage recoveries and the investigation into the 2024 assassination attempt of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Their firings, the lawsuit says, create an “immeasurable loss” to “America's national security."
“In return for their service, they were fired 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,” said a statement from their attorneys, Margaret Donovan, Abbe Lowell and Rebecca Tinio.
“This lawsuit will prove their unlawful dismissal and hold the administration accountable for this blatant attack on the rule of law,” the statement added.
The suit include a detailed recitation of the allegations against Trump, describing how he improperly stored dozens of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, that he took with him after leaving the White House, showed them to people not authorized to see them and obstructed FBI efforts to get them back.
The investigation resulted in a 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that recovered classified records, and a federal indictment in Florida charged Trump with dozens of felony counts.
Trump denied wrongdoing, and the case was dismissed in 2024 by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, who ruled that the special counsel who filed the charges, Jack Smith, had been illegally appointed by the Biden administration Justice Department.
The nine fired FBI employees did not volunteer for the investigation but were rather assigned to it as part of their work on counterintelligence and counterespionage squads, according to the lawsuit, which says they were terminated because of baseless perceptions that the performance of their law enforcement duties had run “afoul of the political and personal loyalty to Trump that Defendants demanded.”
“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.”
Several of the fired employees participated in the search, and one signed the affidavit that was presented to a magistrate judge for approval, the lawsuit says. But beyond that particular case, the suit says, the agents and analysts had a diversity of career experience, including expertise in the counterintelligence threat from Iran and instances of helping recover American hostages held abroad.
At least one participated in the investigation into pipe bombs placed in January 2021 near the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national committees. The investigative team was praised at a news conference by Patel, who shook the hand of one of the employees who would later be fired, Harrison Kaufman, and thanked him for his work, the complaint says.
The lawsuit seeks remedies including reinstatement to the FBI, an awarding of back pay and a court order declaring the firings as unlawful.
Lawyers for the fired employees suggest their clients' “fate was sealed” well before the February terminations, casting the ousters as the culmination of a long-running retribution campaign that kicked into gear 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 derided the Mar-a-Lago search as “unlawful” and had called agents who participated in it “corrupt government gangsters.”
Days after Trump was inaugurated, a top Justice Department official demanded that the FBI produce a list of employees who had investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, an order that the then-director, Brian Driscoll, resisted and that was seen within the workforce as a potential prelude to mass firings of employees involved in Trump-related inquiries
Over the following year, the FBI and Justice Department fired waves of employees involved in investigations of Trump, without hearings or proper notice that the plaintiffs' lawyers say are required by law. Besides the Mar-a-Lago agents, other employees were dismissed for kneeling at a racial justice protest in Washington in 2020 and because of their involvement in a dispute intelligence assessment from 2023 warning of a potential threat from Catholic violent extremists.
The lawsuit suggests the February 2026 firings may have been an attempt to take public attention away from negative publicity Patel received days earlier from his attendance at the Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was seen chugging beer and partying with the U.S. men's hockey team after their gold medal win.
“The Plaintiffs were unlawfully terminated not for any cause or any legitimate reason, but only to satisfy the President’s personal vendetta,” the lawsuit states. “The firings did not follow any internal investigation or disciplinary process within the FBI, and Plaintiffs were not given any notice, a hearing, or an opportunity to appeal.”
