Over the past year, several F.B.I. agents fired by the bureau have sued its director, Kash Patel, seeking to get their jobs back and claiming they were victims of political retribution by the Trump administration.
The agents have included new recruits, seasoned investigators and some of the F.B.I.’s most senior executives. While they each have accused Mr. Patel of dismissing them for improper reasons, the suits have so far all been filed by individuals or small groups of employees.
On Tuesday, however, three fired agents took a new approach and sued Mr. Patel not just on their own accord, but also on behalf of a proposed class of all F.B.I. employees who have already been dismissed — or could be in the future — for political reasons. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, represented one of the broadest efforts to date to seek accountability against Mr. Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi for getting rid of F.B.I. employees who have run afoul of President Trump or his allies.
Each of the agents who brought the suit — Jamie Garman, Blaire Toleman and Michelle Ball — served on a public corruption squad at the F.B.I.’s Washington field office that investigated Mr. Trump’s expansive efforts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election. That inquiry, code-named Arctic Frost, was taken over by the special counsel, Jack Smith, who eventually dropped the conspiracy charges after Mr. Trump was re-elected.
The three agents were all fired last fall, the lawsuit says, because of their work on Mr. Smith’s election interference case and despite their years of “exemplary and unblemished” service in the F.B.I.
“Our removal from federal service — without due process and based on a false perception of political bias — is a profound injustice that raises serious concerns about political interference in federal law enforcement,” they said in a statement released by their lawyer, Daniel M. Eisenberg. “We bring this lawsuit to protect the rule of law and to allow our former colleagues to do their jobs without fear of retaliation.”
The suit seeks to represent a class of more than 50 employees of the F.B.I. who have been terminated since Mr. Trump returned to the White House and any others who might fall prey to what it described as a campaign of retribution by the administration. A federal judge will ultimately decide whether to allow the case to proceed as a class action.
Since taking control of the F.B.I. in February 2025, Mr. Patel has fired or forced out dozens of employees “on the basis of their perceived political affiliation,” the lawsuit said.
Some were fired for working for Mr. Smith on either the election case or the other case he brought against Mr. Trump — the one accusing him of illegally holding onto classified documents after he left office in 2021. Others have lost their jobs after they refused to fire subordinates because of their assignments and without having found any evidence of misconduct.
Still more were fired after kneeling during protests for racial justice in 2020. One agent resigned after claiming he was threatened with demotion for being friends with a former colleague disfavored by Mr. Patel. An agent in training claimed he was fired for hanging a pride flag at his workplace.
The dismissals have been accompanied by a constant drumbeat of verbal attacks against F.B.I. agents by Mr. Trump, Mr. Patel and other senior administration officials. Just this weekend, the lawsuit noted, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas that Mr. Patel had “cleaned house” at the F.B.I.
“There isn’t a single man or woman with a gun, federal agent, still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump,” Mr. Blanche said.
The lawsuit also pointed out that some of Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress appear to have worked in tandem with the F.B.I. to undermine the work of agents who took part in the Trump investigations.
The lawsuit said, for instance, that the firings of Ms. Garman, Mr. Toleman and Ms. Ball took place after Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released documents related to Arctic Frost. Those included records indicating that Mr. Smith’s team had subpoenaed the phone records of some Republican lawmakers, a move that outraged some of the president’s congressional allies.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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