Ex-FBI agents sue Patel over protest firing
The former FBI agents were fired for kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest for ‘apolitical tactical reasons’
What happened
A dozen former FBI agents fired for kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington, D.C., filed a joint lawsuit Monday against FBI Director Kash Patel and the Trump administration, alleging unlawful retaliation. The former counterterrorism agents, deployed by President Donald Trump to manage protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, said in their lawsuit they had “kneeled for apolitical tactical reasons to defuse a volatile situation” after being cornered by an agitated crowd, “not as an expressive political act.”
Who said what
The unnamed plaintiffs — nine women and three men — were “one of the largest groups of former law enforcement officials to challenge the Trump administration in court over its continuing purge of personnel at the Justice Department,” The New York Times said. Other agents “pushed out in recent months have worked on investigations involving Trump or his allies and in one case displayed an LGBTQ+ flag in his workspace,” The Associated Press said.
According to the lawsuit, the FBI cleared the agents of all wrongdoing after a photo of them kneeling “went viral, drawing the ire of conservative commentators and politicians,” The Washington Post said, but Patel started new disciplinary investigations over the summer and fired the agents before the reviews were completed, violating FBI rules. The lawsuit contends that orders to fire the agents “came directly from the White House,” CNN said, and that Patel had already selected the agents to fire “before he joined the agency early this year.”
What next?
The former FBI agents are seeking their jobs back as well as a “court judgment declaring the firings unconstitutional, back pay and other monetary damages and an expungement of personnel files related to the terminations,” the AP said.
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