Twelve former FBI special agents have filed suit against the Bureau and its director after being fired this year for kneeling during racial justice protests in June 2020. The agents, who together have nearly 200 years of service and once received awards for disrupting mass shootings, exposing foreign spies and thwarting cyberattacks, say they were acting to defuse a tense scene rather than to make a partisan political statement.
According to the complaint, the small group of agents was stationed near the National Archives in Washington, D.C., amid volatile crowds. The suit says they lacked crowd-control training and protective gear, were backed against a wall and vastly outnumbered, and knelt as a de-escalation measure to avoid a single misjudgment that could have sparked greater violence. The incident was captured on video and circulated widely, prompting public criticism that framed the gesture as political.
The case was filed in federal court in Washington by former Justice Department prosecutor Mary Dohrmann of the Washington Litigation Group. The Justice Department inspector general reviewed the episode in 2024 and concluded there was no misconduct. Still, the complaint says the matter resurfaced after Kash Patel became FBI director this year and that he targeted the agents: several were stripped of supervisory assignments, a new investigation was opened, and all were dismissed in September before the usual FBI misconduct procedures were completed.
Dismissal letters signed by Patel, the suit says, accused the agents of demonstrating unprofessional conduct and a lack of impartiality in carrying out duties, resulting in the political weaponization of government. The plaintiffs allege those summary firings violated the director’s pledge during confirmation to respect internal review processes and that the abrupt dismissals disrupted the agents ongoing work, including evidence collection in Utah after the shooting of activist Charlie Kirk and efforts connected to the Trump administration’s executive order Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful.
The complaint asserts violations of the agents’ First Amendment right to free association and Fifth Amendment due process protections, and it seeks reinstatement and back pay. The FBI declined to comment on pending litigation.