Three high-ranking FBI officials were fired last month in a "campaign of retribution" carried out by a director who knew better but caved to political pressure from the Trump administration so he could keep his own position, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that seeks reinstatement of the agents.
The complaint asserts that Director Kash Patel indicated directly to one of the ousted agents, Brian Driscoll, that he knew the firings were "likely illegal" but was powerless to stop them because the White House and the Justice Department were determined to remove all agents who helped investigate President Donald Trump. It quotes Patel as having told Driscoll in a conversation last month, "the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn't forgotten it."
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The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Driscoll, Steve Jensen and Spencer Evans, three of five agents known to have been fired last month in a purge that current and former officials say has unnerved the workforce. It represents a legal challenge from the top rungs of the FBI's leadership ladder to a flood of departures under Trump's Republican administration that has wiped out decades of experience. Fired agents have leveled unflattering allegations of a law enforcement agency whose personnel moves are shaped by the White House and guided more by politics than by public safety.
"Patel not only acted unlawfully but deliberately chose to prioritize politicizing the FBI over protecting the American people," the suit says. It adds that "his decision to do so degraded the country's national security by firing three of the FBI's most experienced operational leaders, each of them experts in preventing terrorism and reducing violent crime."
Spokespeople for the FBI had declined to comment after the agents were ousted.
Concerns of reputational damage
The suit was filed in federal court in Washington, where judges and grand juries have pushed back against Trump administration initiatives and charging decisions. It names as defendants Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, as well as the FBI, the Justice Department and the Executive Office of the President.
Besides reinstatement, the suit seeks, among other remedies, the awarding of back pay, an order declaring the firings illegal and even a forum for them to clear their names. It notes that Patel, in a Fox News Channel interview two weeks after the terminations, said "every single person" found to have weaponized the FBI had been removed from leadership positions, even though the suit says there's no indication any of the three had done so.
"This false and defamatory public smear impugned the professional reputation of each of the Plaintiffs, suggesting they were something other than faithful and apolitical law enforcement officials, and has caused not only the loss of the Plaintiffs' present government employment but further harmed their future employment prospects," the suit states.
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Unnerving requests from leadership
The three fired officials, according to the lawsuit, had participated in and supervised some of the FBI's most complex work, including international terrorism investigations.
"They were pinnacles of what the rank-and-file aspired to, and now the FBI has been deprived not only of that example but has been deprived of very important operational competence," said Chris Mattei, one of the agents' lawyers. "Their firing from the FBI, taken together, has put every American at greater risk than when Brian Driscoll, Steve Jensen and Spencer Evans were in positions of leadership."
Another of their attorneys, Abbe Lowell, said the lawsuit shows FBI leadership is "carrying out political orders to punish law enforcement agents for doing their jobs."
Perhaps the most prominent of the plaintiffs is Driscoll, a former commander of the FBI's specialized hostage rescue team who served as acting director between when then-Director Christopher Wray resigned in January and Patel was confirmed in February.
In that job, he had a well-publicized standoff in the first days of the Trump administration with a senior Justice Department official, Emil Bove, over Bove's demand for a list of agents who worked on the investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by a mob of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Driscoll resisted the order in a dispute that led Bove to accuse him of "insubordination."
Driscoll survived the dispute and took another high-profile position overseeing the FBI's Critical Incident Response Group, or CIRG, which deploys to crises. But new problems arose last month, the complaint says, when an FBI pilot whose duties including flying the bureau's private jet was falsely identified on social media as having been a case agent on the investigation into Trump's hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
The complaint says Driscoll was told that the pilot, Chris Meyer, could no longer fly Patel on the FBI plane. Driscoll acceded to the request but refused to strip Meyer entirely of his pilot duties and balked when told of Trump administration desires to fire him.
The lawsuit recounts a conversation from early August in which Driscoll told Patel that it would be illegal to fire someone based on case assignments. Patel, according to the suit, said he understood the actions were "likely illegal" but that he had to fire who his superiors wanted him to "because his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the President."
Meyer was later fired but is not among the plaintiffs in Wednesday's suit.
One of the plaintiffs, Jensen, was picked by Patel to run the bureau's Washington field office despite a backlash from Trump loyalists about his earlier leadership role coordinating investigations into the Capitol riot. The suit says that even as Jensen was publicly defended by FBI leadership, he was told by Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino that they were spending "a lot of political capital" to keep him in the position.
In May, according to the complaint, Bongino told him he would have to fire an agent assigned to his office who'd worked on Trump-related cases but also investigations into officials of both major political parties. That agent, Walter Giardina, was also among the five who were fired.
Another plaintiff, Evans, says he was targeted for retribution over his leadership role in the FBI's Human Resources Division during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made him responsible for reviewing accommodation requests from employees seeking exemption from vaccine requirements.
That position exposed Evans to a barrage of criticism from a former agent who the lawsuit says regularly aired his grievances against Evans on social media and maintained access to Patel.
Evans was among senior executives told in late January to either retire or be fired, but he was given a reprieve and permitted to remain in his job as leader of the Las Vegas field office. Despite being reassured that he had the support of Patel and Bongino, he was told in May that he would have to leave his position.
On Aug. 6, the lawsuit says, Evans was packing for a new FBI assignment in Huntsville, Alabama, when he was notified that he had been fired. The stated cause was a "lack of reasonableness and overzealousness" in implementing COVID-19 protocols, though the suit says he has no recollection of having ever denied a request for a vaccination exemption.
