The F.B.I. is reassigning several female agents in supervisory positions who knelt during demonstrations protesting police violence in the District of Columbia in 2020, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The move has raised concerns among current and former bureau employees that the F.B.I. is taking action against agents and analysts who were involved in situations denounced by allies of President Trump and the right-wing news media. The agents appear to have been offered no reason for the decision, according to those familiar with the matter.
It comes after Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, testified before Congress during his confirmation hearing in late January that he would not settle scores inside the bureau.
“And as I told you in your office, I have no interest, no desire and will not, if confirmed, go backwards,” Mr. Patel told Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who serves on the Judiciary Committee. “There will be no politicization at the F.B.I. There will be no retributive actions taken by any F.B.I., should I be confirmed as the F.B.I. director.”
The news of the reassignments was reported earlier by CNN. F.B.I. leadership has the authority to reassign employees based on the needs of the bureau, but the decision to reassign the agents five years later is being viewed as retaliatory by former and current agents.
It is not clear if the F.B.I. has referred the agents to the division of the bureau responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct, as would be typical. Regardless, it is highly unusual for the F.B.I. to revisit conduct that had been scrutinized five years earlier.
The bureau can move employees at will as long as they maintain the same pay and position. If their reassignment was motivated by reprisal or discrimination, there are legal options for the agents to pursue.
The F.B.I. said in a statement that “it is our standard practice to decline to comment on personnel matters.”
The agents told their superiors at the time that they were trying to defuse tensions as Black Lives Matter protesters descended on Washington in the spring and summer of 2020. Their decision to take a knee that June outraged former and current agents at the time, including senior executives, who also believed that the women involved put themselves and the team at a tactical disadvantage.
The bureau reviewed their behavior but found no reason to pursue a formal investigation.
The agents also said their kneeling was not intended to be a political protest, and they were not found to be in violation of agency policies or the Hatch Act, a Depression-era law devised to ensure that the federal work force operates free of political influence or coercion.
At least one of the women, a senior executive, had already been quietly reassigned before the other agents were notified in recent days that they were being moved. And shortly after Mr. Patel became director, a senior bureau official in the F.B.I. Agents Association who was involved in the episode was forced to resign.
In April, the F.B.I. suspended an analyst on Mr. Patel’s so-called enemies list. The analyst, Brian Auten, was placed on administrative leave with pay.
Former and current agents have said that F.B.I. personnel should never have been deployed to protect monuments and federal property, as they were in 2020, because they are not equipped or trained to deal with rioters or mass confrontation.
A 2024 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general found that F.B.I. deployments on June 1 and 3 “lacked adequate planning” and “failed to provide sufficient guidance to personnel regarding their mission and legal authorities.”
The report added that the deployments, “by sending armed agents to respond to civil unrest for which they lacked the proper training or equipment, created safety and security risks for the agents and the public.”
Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
The post F.B.I. Reassigns Agents Who Knelt During Racial Justice Protests in 2020 appeared first on New York Times.
