Nine Fired FBI Agents Sue Patel Over Purge Tied to Trump Documents Case

Nine former employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation sued Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Todd Blanche and their agencies on Wednesday, alleging they were fired without cause this year because they had worked on the federal investigation into Donald Trump's handling of classified documents after he left office in 2021.

The 70-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and first reported by Axios, says the plaintiffs — a mix of special agents, staff operations specialists and intelligence analysts — represent more than a century of combined service to the bureau. All nine were terminated over two days in late February 2026, according to the filing, without notice, a hearing or any opportunity to appeal.

What the lawsuit says

The plaintiffs are Jennifer Bacon, Zach Feldman, Gilbert Granados, Catherine Herrera, Harrison Kaufman, Jeremy Linton, Erin Matanic, Danielle Ray and Rachel Vaccaro. None volunteered for the assignment, the complaint says; they were placed on the case team because they belonged to FBI counterintelligence and intelligence squads with expertise in espionage and the mishandling of classified material.

That assignment was to an investigation the FBI internally labeled "Plasmic Echo" and the public knows as the classified documents case — the inquiry into how dozens of boxes marked "Top Secret," "Secret" and "Confidential" ended up at Mar-a-Lago after Trump's first term. A federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida returned a 38-count indictment against Trump in 2023, later expanded to 42 counts against him and two employees. A district judge dismissed the case in 2024 on the grounds that the special counsel overseeing it had been improperly appointed, and the Justice Department withdrew its appeal after Trump won reelection, citing the department's policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

The lawsuit says Patel fired each plaintiff by letter citing only his "authority as the FBI Director" and the Constitution's Article II — what the complaint calls an "invention of the current Administration" with no basis in civil-service law. It accuses Patel, Blanche and others of having "publicly impugned Plaintiffs' integrity" and argues the firings violated the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights to free association and speech and their Fifth Amendment right to due process. Two of the nine, Bacon and Linton, bring an additional claim: as preference-eligible military veterans in positions with statutory removal protections under federal civil service law, they argue their removal under an asserted Article II authority amounted to a violation of the separation of powers, since Congress — not the FBI director — holds the power to set conditions on firing federal employees.

The numbers

• 9 plaintiffs, fired over a two-day span in late February 2026
• More than 100 combined years of FBI and prior military service among them
• 3 causes of action: First Amendment, Fifth Amendment due process, and — for two plaintiffs — separation of powers
• At least 2 other pending federal lawsuits over FBI firings tied to Trump-related investigations, filed by other former agents since 2025

How the firings came about

According to the complaint, the push to remove employees connected to the Mar-a-Lago search began almost as soon as Trump returned to office in January 2025. It alleges that then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, citing pressure from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, demanded that interim FBI leadership turn over the names of everyone who had participated in the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago so they could be terminated — a demand the complaint says acting FBI leadership refused at the time. Patel, confirmed as FBI director weeks later, carried out the firings himself roughly a year after that standoff, the lawsuit says.

The case follows a pattern of litigation from FBI personnel removed since Patel took over the bureau. Three other former agents who had worked a public-corruption squad supporting the Mar-a-Lago investigation sued Patel in March 2026, and former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll separately sued over his own ouster the year before. Those earlier complaints, like Wednesday's, cite public remarks Blanche made at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2026, when he was deputy attorney general, telling the audience that the administration had "cleaned house" at the bureau.

"There isn't a single man or woman with a gun, federal agent, still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump," Blanche told the conference.

The firings fit a wider pattern one tally of administration targets has tracked across agencies, from law enforcement to the Federal Reserve. The new complaint goes further than earlier filings in tying the firings directly and individually to work on the documents case rather than to broader political suspicion, and in naming Blanche, rather than his predecessor, as a sitting defendant.

Who is affected

The complaint details each plaintiff's career. Bacon, a 25-year veteran who served as an Air Force officer before joining the FBI in 2010, had risen to section chief in the Counterintelligence Division and briefed Patel directly on a trip to Australia in 2025, according to the filing, which says Patel called her presentation "one of the best briefings he received during his trip." Feldman, a mechanical engineer by training, had completed years of tactical certification and was six weeks from being eligible to compete for a spot on the Washington Field Office's SWAT team when he was let go, the complaint says. Granados had worked FBI responses to the 2016 Brussels terrorist attacks and later supported counterespionage investigations touching Iran; Herrera had become what the complaint describes as one of the bureau's foremost experts on Russian intelligence capabilities and had helped the Secret Service track threats against Trump after the 2020 killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.

Beyond the plaintiffs themselves, the lawsuit argues the firings had operational costs: it says the nine were in the middle of active counterintelligence and counterterrorism cases that "were not properly transferred to other FBI Special Agents or Analysts" when they were dismissed, calling the resulting gap in coverage immeasurable to national security. The suit does not identify which specific investigations were affected.

What happens next

The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the firings unconstitutional, order their reinstatement to the FBI, award back pay and other damages, and award attorneys' fees. They are represented by attorneys from Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, from KKL LLP, and by Abbe David Lowell of Lowell & Associates, a Washington lawyer who has represented a string of high-profile clients in disputes with the current administration. Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI had publicly responded to the new filing as of Wednesday; both agencies have previously said they do not comment on pending litigation.

The case, filed as the Trump administration continues to face a string of lawsuits over personnel actions across federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, joins a docket already crowded with similar claims. How quickly it moves will likely hinge on procedural fights common to federal employment suits against Cabinet officials, including questions of whether the plaintiffs can bring their claims in federal court at all rather than through the FBI's internal disciplinary channels — an argument the Justice Department has raised in the earlier, related cases.