FBI agents and analysts fired for roles in Trump classified files probe
sue to get their jobs back
[October 16, 2026]
By ERIC TUCKER
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 by FBI Director Kash Patel of agents who participated in
investigations of the Republican president or who were perceived 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
investigated 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 Mar-a-Lago investigation produced criminal charges against Trump
The suit includes 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 the
following year 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 a baseless perception 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.”
[to top of second column]
|
A letter from acting archivist of the United States Debra Steidel
Wall to former President Donald Trump's legal team, detailing that
the National Archives recovered 100 documents bearing classified
markings, totaling more than 700 pages, from an initial batch of 15
boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago earlier in 2022, is photographed,
Aug. 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File)
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
unlawful.
The suit says the firings were the culmination of a retribution
campaign
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
for 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.”
All contents © copyright 2026 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
