Fired FBI Employees From Trump Documents Case Sue Patel Over 'Unlawful' Terminations

Nine former FBI employees who worked on the bureau's investigation into Donald Trump's handling of classified documents after he left office sued FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche on Thursday, arguing their summary dismissals in February violated their constitutional rights and were ordered for purely political reasons.

The 70-page complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names Jennifer Bacon, Zach Feldman, Gilbert Granados, Catherine Herrera, Harrison Kaufman, Jeremy Linton, Erin Matanic, Danielle Ray and Rachel Vaccaro as plaintiffs. All were Special Agents, staff operations specialists or intelligence analysts assigned to "Plasmic Echo," the investigation that led to Trump's 2023 indictment over classified records recovered from Mar-a-Lago. The suit says none of them volunteered for the assignment; they were placed on it because they belonged to FBI counterintelligence and intelligence squads with relevant expertise.

The Numbers Behind the Firings

According to the complaint, all nine were terminated over a two-day span in February 2026, most of them on February 25. Combined, they represent more than a century of FBI service, including work on the Boston Marathon bombing investigation and the response to the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Each received a termination letter signed by Patel invoking "Article II" authority and asserting that the employee had "exercised poor judgment and a lack of impartiality in carrying out duties, leading to the political weaponization of the government." Yet the personnel forms the FBI separately issued each plaintiff recorded the separations as not having been "for cause," the complaint says. The bureau employs roughly 38,000 people, and a 2021 Justice Department inspector general review found that only 351 employees were dismissed for disciplinary reasons over the entire decade-plus between fiscal years 2007 and 2018 — a baseline the plaintiffs cite to argue that firings like theirs are, historically, exceedingly rare.

How the Case Team Was Identified

The documents investigation began after Trump left office in 2021 having moved boxes of classified material to his private club, prompting a Justice Department grand jury indictment in 2023 that a federal judge later dismissed on the grounds that the special counsel who brought it had been improperly appointed; the department withdrew its appeal after Trump won the 2024 election. The complaint alleges that after Trump's second inauguration, then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove pressured interim FBI leadership to take "symmetrical action" against anyone tied to the Mar-a-Lago search, and that acting leadership initially refused to turn over names. The plaintiffs say the case team was ultimately identified on February 23, 2026, when a Special Agent on Patel's "Director's Advisory Team" requested urgent access to the Plasmic Echo case file; within 48 hours, the firings began. Plaintiff Jennifer Bacon, a 25-year FBI veteran and Section Chief in the Counterintelligence Division, was called out of a meeting and terminated that Wednesday; Zach Feldman, a Special Agent since 2021 who was six weeks from competing for a spot on the Washington Field Office's SWAT team, was handed his letter as he was about to leave the building the same week.

Conflicting Accounts, Including Before Congress

The suit raises due-process and separation-of-powers claims in addition to its First Amendment retaliation count, arguing that Bacon and Linton — a Senior Executive Service member and a military veteran, respectively — held statutory removal protections that only permit termination "for cause" after notice and a hearing, protections the complaint says Patel's letters never invoked or satisfied. It also argues that an ordinary appeal route, the Merit Systems Protection Board, would be futile because the board now has only two sitting members, both from the same party, after Trump removed a third before her term expired; the complaint cites reporting that MSPB leadership has stopped describing the board as "independent." The complaint quotes Patel's own testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on September 15, 2026, where he told Senator Richard Blumenthal that the plaintiffs "were terminated for weaponizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation" and, asked about their expertise tracking Iranian threats, said "you can define them as experts, but they definitely are not." Under questioning from Senator Adam Schiff about whether any had engaged in misconduct beyond their assignments, Patel said "there's an entire inspection division at the FBI that looked at the totality" of the employees — a claim the complaint disputes, saying the Inspection Division never investigated any of the plaintiffs and that some of Patel's other statements to the committee, including that some of them had retired, were false.

Abbe David Lowell, Margaret Donovan and Rebecca S. Tinio, the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, called the dismissals "this blatant attack on the rule of law" in a statement reported by NBC News, which first reported the filing Thursday.

"They were fired because they did their jobs, as they always did, to follow the facts and law without bias or favor. To this administration, this is an offense. To the rest of us, it is heroic."

The FBI and Justice Department did not respond to NBC's request for comment on the suit. The complaint itself frames the dismissals in starker terms, alleging plaintiffs "were unlawfully terminated not for any cause or any legitimate reason, but only to satisfy the President's personal vendetta."

What Comes Next

The plaintiffs are asking the court for declaratory judgments that their firings violated the First and Fifth Amendments and, for Bacon and Linton, the separation of powers; for reinstatement to their FBI positions; for back pay; and for attorneys' fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act. No scheduling order or government response has yet appeared on the docket. The filing adds to a widening set of lawsuits from current and former FBI personnel challenging firings they attribute to the administration's handling of investigations touching Trump, including a separate suit brought last year by former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll and other senior officials, and another from agents who say they were targeted over their roles responding to 2020 protests. With the Justice Department having already prevailed in getting the original Mar-a-Lago indictment dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, the new case will test whether a different legal theory — built on civil service and constitutional protections rather than the criminal case itself — can succeed where the earlier prosecution did not survive.