Three high-ranking FBI officials are suing FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Justice Department, and the Executive Office of the President over an alleged “campaign of retribution.” According to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday—with Abbe Lowell named as one of the attorneys—the suit claims Patel succumbed to political pressure from the Trump administration to keep his own position intact. Lowell also represents Lisa Cook. Brian Driscoll is among the plaintiffs suing Patel, who led the FBI during the chaotic weeks following Trump’s inauguration in January.
The Associated Press reports:
The complaint asserts that Director Kash Patel indicated directly to one of the ousted agents, Brian Driscoll, that he knew the firings were “likely illegal” but was powerless to stop them because the White House and the Justice Department were determined to remove all agents who helped investigate President Donald Trump. It quotes Patel as having told Driscoll in a conversation last month “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.”
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Driscoll, Steve Jensen and Spencer Evans, three of five agents known to have been fired last month in a purge that current and former officials say has unnerved the workforce. It represents a legal challenge from the top rungs of the FBI’s leadership ladder to a flood of departures under Trump’s Republican administration that has wiped out decades of experience. Fired agents have leveled unflattering allegations of a law enforcement agency whose personnel moves are shaped by the White House and guided more by politics than by public safety.
“Patel not only acted unlawfully but deliberately chose to prioritize politicizing the FBI over protecting the American people,” the suit says. It adds that “his decision to do so degraded the country’s national security by firing three of the FBI’s most experienced operational leaders, each of them experts in preventing terrorism and reducing violent crime.”
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The three fired officials, according to the lawsuit, had participated in and supervised some of the FBI’s most complex work, including international terrorism investigations.
“They were pinnacles of what the rank-and-file aspired to, and now the FBI has been deprived not only of that example but has been deprived of very important operational competence,” said Chris Mattei, one of the agents’ lawyers. “Their firing from the FBI, taken together, has put every American at greater risk than when Brian Driscoll, Steve Jensen and Spencer Evans were in positions of leadership.”
Another of their attorneys, Abbe Lowell, said the lawsuit shows FBI leadership is “carrying out political orders to punish law enforcement agents for doing their jobs.”
It would be interesting to see the Trump picks argue that it wasn’t a “campaign of retribution,” when everyone can see that’s what this president lives and breathes for. And the discovery part should be fun!