Nine former FBI employees involved in the classified documents case against President Donald Trump filed suit Thursday against FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche, alleging their firings were “unlawful.”The group’s suit says they were fired without cause for their work on the case involving Trump, and that the firings appeared to be politically motivated.It noted they were booted while FBI Patel was being criticized by the administration for partying with the U.S.
Olympic hockey team.FBI Special Agent Miles Starr, who was working in a unit called the “Director’s Advisory Team” that was apparently formed to look into Trump’s perceived political enemies, had demanded urgent access to the “Plasmic Echo” case file — the code name for the investigation into the classified documents case — on Feb.23, the lawsuit says.
That was after video of Patel chugging a beer and “flinging alcohol around the U.S.men’s hockey team’s locker room at the Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, began circulating widely on social media and news sites,” the suit says.
The file had the names of the agents who’d worked on the investigation, and they were summarily fired over the next few days without any of the required due process, the suit says.“Each Plaintiff was provided with a termination letter signed by Director Patel” that falsely claimed that they had exercised “poor judgment and a lack of impartiality in carrying out their duties, leading to the political weaponization of the government,” the suit says.
Patel later told Congress they were fired for cause and after internal investigations, claims the suit says are not true.NBC News has reached out to the FBI and Justice Department for comment.The filing says the former employees “did not volunteer to participate in Plasmic Echo; they were assigned to the case because they were members of specific FBI Counterintelligence and Intelligence squads” and the nine “performed t...