WASHINGTON (AP) — Twelve former FBI agents fired after kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington sued Monday to get their jobs back, saying their action was meant to defuse a volatile situation and was not meant as a political gesture.
The agents say in their lawsuit that they were fired in September by director Kash Patel because they were perceived as not politically affiliated with President Donald Trump. But they say their decision to kneel on June 4, 2020, days after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, was misconstrued as political expression.
The lawsuit says the agents were assigned to patrol the nation’s capital during a period of civil unrest sparked by Floyd’s death. Lacking protective gear or extensive training in crowd control, the agents were outnumbered by the hostile crowds they encountered and decided to kneel on the ground in hopes of defusing the tension, the lawsuit states. The tactic worked, the lawsuit claims — the crowds dispersed, no shots were fired, and the agents “saved American lives” that day.
“Plaintiffs were performing their duties as special agents of the FBI, using reasonable detente to prevent a potentially deadly confrontation with American citizens: a massacre in Washington that could have rivaled the Boston Massacre of 1770,” the suit says.
The FBI declined to comment Monday.
The lawsuit in federal court in Washington is the latest challenge to a personnel purge that has roiled the FBI, targeting both top supervisors and line agents, as Patel has worked to reshape the nation’s top law enforcement agency. In addition to the kneeling agents, other employees fired in recent months worked on investigations involving Trump or his allies and, in one case, displayed an LGBTQ+ flag in his workspace.
After photos surfaced of the agents kneeling, the FBI conducted an internal review, with the then-deputy director determining that the agents had no political motive and should not be punished. The Justice Department’s inspector general reached a similar conclusion and faulted the department for putting agents in a precarious situation that day, the lawsuit says.
It wasn’t until Patel took office in February that the FBI took a different stance.
Several kneeling agents were removed from supervisory roles last spring, and a new disciplinary investigation was launched that led to the agents being interviewed about their actions. That internal process was still pending when the agents received terse letters in September saying they were being terminated due to “unprofessional behavior and lack of impartiality in the performance of duties, which resulted in the political alignment of the government.”
“Defendants fired Plaintiffs in a partisan effort to retaliate against FBI employees they perceived to be sympathetic to political opponents of President Trump,” the lawsuit states. “And the defendants moved summarily to avoid the creation of any further administrative records that would reveal their actions as vindictive and unjustified.”
The plaintiffs are among 22 agents from various teams in Washington who were deployed to downtown DC on June 4, 2020 to demonstrate a visible law enforcement process during a period of protests in the nation’s capital and across the country.
The suit alleges the agents were pushed into a chaotic scene, saying a crowd recognized them as FBI and “purposefully” pushed toward them, becoming “increasingly agitated” and shouting and gesturing at them. Some in the crowd began chanting “kneel down,” a gesture that at the time was widely recognized as a sign of solidarity with Floyd, who was pinned to the pavement by police with a knee on his neck.
The agents closest to the crowd were the first to kneel. After the crowd’s attention turned to the other agents who remained standing, the other FBI employees followed suit, taking a knee in recognition that it was “the best tactical means to prevent violence and maintain order.” The crowd moved on.
“Plaintiffs demonstrated tactical intelligence in choosing between lethal force — the only force available as a practical matter, given their lack of adequate crowd control equipment — and a less lethal response that would save lives and maintain order,” the suit says. “Special agents chose the option that prevented casualties while maintaining their law enforcement mission. Each plaintiff knelt for apolitical tactical reasons to defuse a volatile situation, not as an expressive political act.”
In addition to the reinstatement request, the lawsuit also seeks a court order declaring the firings unconstitutional, back and other monetary damages, and the expungement of personnel records related to the terminations.