About 10 F.B.I. employees, some veteran agents, were dismissed this week for their work on the investigation into President Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his residence in Florida, according to five people with knowledge of the move.
The firings are part of a rolling barrage of retribution aimed at those who worked on the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump after his first term in office. They came hours after Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, told Reuters that as part of the documents inquiry, the bureau had subpoenaed phone metadata for himself and Susie Wiles, currently the White House chief of staff.
They are not expected to be the last, those people said.
Requests for phone records are common in complex criminal investigations to establish timelines and provide proof of communication. It remains unclear if the F.B.I.’s Trump-appointed leaders have accused employees of wrongdoing. In the past, they have not. In some cases, firings have violated procedural safeguards created to protect agents from politically motivated dismissal, according to agents and their lawyers.
The F.B.I. Agents Association denounced the dismissals in a statement, describing them as an unlawful termination that “violates the due process rights of those who risk their lives to protect our country.”
Mr. Patel’s announcement came at a tenuous moment in his tenure, after a week of unflattering headlines about his taxpayer-funded travel, which most recently included an appearance at the Olympics in Milan, where he celebrated the U.S. hockey team’s gold medal victory in their locker room.
The firings are likely to stoke growing resentments against Mr. Patel, a Trump ally seen by many agents as a high-flying neophyte willing to sack rank-and-file employees on a whim, without evidence they did anything wrong, according to current and former officials.
Mr. Patel said that not only did the F.B.I. under the Biden administration request phone toll records for himself and Ms. Wiles, which did not include recordings or any information relating to the content of conversations, but officials at the time also sought to conceal they had done so in requesting court approval.
Some, possibly all, of those fired were involved in that effort, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
Mr. Patel portrayed himself as a victim of a malicious effort to target Mr. Trump and those who supported him during his four years out of office, including himself, Ms. Wiles and others caught up in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
“It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous F.B.I. leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records,” he said in his statement to Reuters.
He accused the bureau of “using flimsy pretexts” to hide its request for the records and “evade all oversight.”
It has been known for years that Mr. Patel was closely scrutinized by Mr. Smith’s investigators and was compelled to testify in front of a grand jury. The fact that investigators obtained some of Ms. Wiles’s phone records was made public during the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.
A spokesman for Mr. Patel referred reporters to the statement given to Reuters.
Mr. Patel came under scrutiny after it emerged that he had come to Mr. Trump’s aid after the F.B.I. searched Mr. Trump’s residence in August 2022.
He claimed Mr. Trump had already declassified all the documents at issue, rendering prosecution invalid, a questionable legal theory prosecutors wanted to test in court.
The subpoena for Ms. Wiles’s records was largely restricted to her communications with lawyers working for Trump, or witnesses in the Trump cases.
Prosecutors were interested in determining whether the benefit of legal counsel paid by Trump-related fund-raising entities was being used as an inducement to persuade witnesses not to cooperate in the investigations.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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