Twelve former FBI agents sued senior FBI and Justice Department leaders on Monday, saying they were unlawfully fired for taking a knee in an effort to quell racial justice protests in 2020 spurred by the police killing of George Floyd.

In the lawsuit, the former agents said they believed their terminations were ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration, and that FBI Director Kash Patel was determined to remove them from their posts as soon as he was confirmed.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, did not name the agents, nine of whom are women. It comes after senior FBI leaders in September, including former Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, also filed a lawsuit over their terminations, saying they were fired in a “campaign of retribution.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on pending litigation.

Floyd Killing Sparked Widespread Protests

The killing of Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer in May 2020 sparked a flurry of protests around the world, including in Washington, D.C. Then-Attorney General Bill Barr deployed federal agents, including agents in the FBI’s Washington field office, to try to tamp down the civil unrest.

On June 4, 2020, as a group of FBI agents were near the National Archives, a swarm of protesters surrounded them and backed them into a wall. Amid the chaos, several of the agents took a knee. Soon, others followed suit after noticing that it was helping to de-escalate the crowd.

The decision by the agents to kneel was later reviewed by senior FBI officials, who determined that the agents had taken this step to quell the chaos, and not for political reasons.

The photographs of the kneeling agents went viral on social media, and prompted some of Trump’s supporters to accuse them of kneeling in support of left-wing movements.

Trump Focused on Incident

In 2023, Trump also called attention to the incident, posting on his Truth Social account a news story about the agents in which then-U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz accused them of later receiving “plum” promotions at the FBI.

In Monday’s lawsuit, several of the former agents said they were abruptly demoted from supervisory positions in April because of the kneeling incident.

After that, Patel ordered Steve Jensen, the former head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office who was also later fired, to compile a list of names of all those who kneeled that day, the lawsuit said. Jensen convinced Patel to initiate an internal investigation first, before taking any personnel action.

But in September, while the internal review was still pending and no decision had been made, the agents were fired, the lawsuit alleges.

In the termination letters, which accused the agents of “unprofessional conduct and a lack of impartiality” which led to the “weaponization” of the FBI, Patel alleged he had reviewed all of the materials in the internal investigation.

The lawsuit says that the materials from those internal investigations showed the opposite of what Patel claimed.

“Defendants targeted plaintiffs in particular because of plaintiffs’ use of de-escalation with civilians that defendants perceived as opposed to, or otherwise not affiliated with, President Trump,” the lawsuit says.

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(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone, Daniel Wallis and Matthew Lewis)