WASHINGTON (AP) — Twelve former FBI agents fired after kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington on Monday sued to get their jobs back, saying their action was meant to defuse a volatile situation and was not intended as a political gesture.
The agents said in their lawsuit that they were fired in September by Director Kash Patel because they were perceived as not being politically affiliated with President Donald Trump. But they say their decision to take a knee on June 4, 2020, days after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, has been misinterpreted as political expression.
The suit says the agents were assigned to patrol the nation’s capital during a period of civil unrest sparked by Floyd’s death. Lacking protective equipment or extensive training in crowd control, the agents became less than hostile crowds they encountered and decided to kneel on the ground in the hope of reducing tension, the lawsuit said. The tactic worked, the lawsuit asserts — the crowds dispersed, no shots were fired and the agents “saved American lives” that day.
“Plaintiffs were performing their duties as FBI Special Agents, and used reasonable restraint to prevent a potentially fatal confrontation with American citizens: a Washington Massacre that could rival the Boston Massacre of 1770,” the lawsuit says.
The FBI declined to comment Monday.
The lawsuit in federal court in Washington represents the latest court challenge to a personnel purge that has roiled the FBI, targeting both top supervisors and line agents, as Patel has worked to reshape the nation’s top law enforcement agency. In addition to the kneeling agents, other employees pushed out in recent months worked on investigations involving Trump or his allies and in one case displayed an LGBTQ+ flag in his workspace.
After photos emerged of the agents taking a knee, the FBI conducted an internal review, with the deputy director at the time determining that the agents had no political motive and should not be punished. The Justice Department’s inspector general reached a similar conclusion and faulted the department for putting the agents in a precarious situation that day, the suit says.
It was only after Patel took over the bureau in February that the FBI took a different stance.
Multiple kneeling agents were removed from supervisory positions last spring and a new disciplinary inquiry was launched that led to the agents being interviewed about their actions. That internal process was still pending when the agents in September received terse letters telling them they were being terminated due to “unprofessional conduct and lack of impartiality in the performance of duties, which led to the government’s political arsenal.”
“Defendants dismissed Plaintiffs in a partisan effort to retaliate against FBI employees who they perceived to be sympathetic to political opponents of President Trump,” the lawsuit says. “And Defendants acted summarily to avoid creating any other administrative record that would reveal their actions as vindictive and unjustified.”
The plaintiffs are among 22 agents from different squads across Washington who were deployed to downtown DC on June 4, 2020 to demonstrate a visible law enforcement process during a time of protests in the nation’s capital and across the country.
The case affirms that the agents were involved in a chaotic scene, and said that a crowd recognized them as being from the FBI and “intentionally” pushed towards them, they became “always agitated” and shouted and gestured towards them. Some of the crowd began chanting “take a knee,” a gesture that at that point was widely recognized as a sign of solidarity with Floyd, who was pinned to the sidewalk by police with a knee on his neck.
The agents closest to the crowd were the first to kneel. After the crowd’s attention turned to the other agents who remained standing, the other FBI employees followed suit, taking a knee in recognition that it was “the most tactically sound means of preventing violence and maintaining order.” The crowd moved on.
“The plaintiffs demonstrated tactical intelligence in choosing between deadly force—the only force available to them as a practical matter, given their lack of adequate crowd control equipment—and a less-than-lethal response that would save lives and maintain order.,” the lawsuit says. “The Special Agents chose the option to prevent casualties while maintaining their law enforcement mission. Each Actor knelt for apolitical tactical reasons to defuse a volatile situation, not as an expressive political act.”
In addition to seeking reinstatement, the suit also asks for a court ruling declaring the firing unconstitutional, backpay and other monetary damages and the removal of personnel files related to the terminations.