WASHINGTON (TNND) — FBI employees who were fired for working on the probe into President Trump's retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago filed a lawsuit on Thursday against their former employer for back pay and reinstatement to the bureau.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Justice Department and the FBI on behalf of the nine former bureau agents, intelligence analysts, and staff operations specialists by their lawyers, Margaret Donovan, Abbe Lowell, and Rebecca Tinio, The Associated Press reported.
The former employees were fired in February, after other agents were previously dismissed for working on the investigation into Trump's alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss. FBI Director Kash Patel has testified before Congress that employees he has fired had “weaponized” the bureau.
The lawsuit argues against the weaponization claim, noting that between the nine employees, they had more than a century of distinguished and apolitical FBI service that included responding to the Boston Marathon bombing, hostage recoveries, and the investigation into the 2024 assassination attempt of Trump in Butler, Pa.
According to the complaint, the employees' firings create an “immeasurable loss” to “America's national security."
“This lawsuit will prove their unlawful dismissal and hold the administration accountable for this blatant attack on the rule of law,” they added.
The complaint recounts the allegations against Trump in the classified documents probe, which resulted in an FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in 2022 before an indictment was brought against him. Trump denied the allegations, and a federal judge dismissed the case in 2024, ruling that then-special counsel Jack Smith had been illegally appointed by the DOJ under the Biden administration.
According to the lawsuit, the nine fired FBI employees did not volunteer for the investigation but were assigned to it as part of their work on specialized counterintelligence and counterespionage squads. The complaint says that the employees were fired because of unfounded 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 reads, using the FBI code name for the classified documents probe. “Worse still, Defendants incorrectly concluded that those personal political convictions affected or drove their work.”
The former employees' lawsuit requests, among other remedies, reinstatement to the FBI, an award of back pay, and a court order declaring that the firings were unlawful.