Nine former FBI employees sue over Trump documents case firings

Nine former FBI employees who worked on the investigation into President Donald Trump’s retention of classified records sued the bureau and senior Justice Department officials Thursday, alleging they were fired because they had been assigned to the case.

The former agents, intelligence analysts and staff specialists say they were dismissed without an investigation, hearing or opportunity to appeal. Their lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, seeks reinstatement and back pay. It names the FBI, Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department as defendants.

The plaintiffs “were unlawfully terminated not for any cause or any legitimate reason, but only to satisfy the President’s personal vendetta,” the complaint alleges. The FBI and Justice Department had been contacted for comment, CBS News and NBC News reported.

The nine employees — Jennifer Bacon, Zach Feldman, Gilbert Granados, Catherine Herrera, Harrison Kaufman, Jeremy Linton, Erin Matanic, Danielle Ray and Rachel Vaccaro — say they were assigned to the classified-documents investigation because they worked on FBI counterintelligence and intelligence squads. They did not volunteer for it and performed their duties without political bias, the complaint says.

The lawsuit describes events leading up to the firings. On Feb. 23, FBI agent Miles Starr, a member of Patel’s Director’s Advisory Team, urgently sought access to files for “Plasmic Echo,” the documents investigation’s code name, saying he was acting on Patel’s instructions. Bacon gave him access to files that contained the names of all nine plaintiffs, except for one subfile, according to the complaint.

Eight plaintiffs were fired on Feb. 25 and the ninth the next day. Each received a letter signed by Patel alleging “poor judgment and a lack of impartiality in carrying out their duties, leading to the political weaponization of the government,” the lawsuit says. The plaintiffs dispute that assessment and say Patel’s later assertion to Congress that internal investigations preceded their dismissals was false.

The complaint also raises the possibility that the firings were connected to criticism of Patel after video circulated of him drinking beer and throwing alcohol in the U.S. men’s hockey team’s locker room at the Winter Olympics in Milan. It offers no finding establishing such a connection. On Feb. 25, Patel told Reuters that his phone records and those of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles had been subpoenaed during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations.

The employees had more than a century of combined FBI service, according to the lawsuit. It says some had worked on the Boston Marathon bombing and the investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Their abrupt dismissals left sensitive counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations without proper handovers, the complaint alleges.

The documents case began after agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in August 2022 and allegedly recovered more than 100 documents bearing classified markings. Trump pleaded not guilty to charges related to retaining records and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. A federal judge dismissed the case after finding Smith had been improperly appointed, and the Justice Department dropped its appeal following Trump’s 2024 election victory.

Attorneys for the nine said their clients were fired “because they did their jobs, as they always did, to follow the facts and the law without bias or favor.”