WASHINGTON — Nine FBI employees who were fired this year for having worked on an investigation of President Donald Trump sued the administration Thursday, saying Kash Patel, the bureau’s director, praised some of them privately before terminating them.

Most of the employees, who include agents, analysts and operations staff members, had significant experience in counterintelligence work related to Iran. Some played major roles in the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and estate in Florida. One agent signed the affidavit for the search of the estate. Another conducted interviews with witnesses in that case.

The lawsuit suggests that, while the president and his aides have always been eager to fire agents who worked on investigations of Trump, a motivating factor for their dismissals in February was the scrutiny Patel was under after going to Milan to watch the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Olympics. Video circulated widely showing Patel chugging a beer in the men’s locker room after the team won gold, behavior that the lawsuit calls “a display of wild immaturity and lack of personal control.”

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit also accuses Patel of providing false answers to Congress about the employees’ dismissals when he claimed that they were the result of internal investigations.

“When these terminations occur, there are internal investigations conducted by the careers at the FBI that highlight unethical or inappropriate conduct, and it’s up to me to make the decision,” Patel testified in March before the House Intelligence Committee.

The lawsuit asserts that answer was false. The nine plaintiffs “were unlawfully terminated not for any cause or any legitimate reason, but only to satisfy the president’s personal vendetta,” it says. “The firings did not follow any internal investigation or disciplinary process within the FBI.”

While Patel asserted at the hearing that the employees “were terminated for violating their ethical obligations,” the suit contends the firings were part of a larger pattern by the Trump administration of violating civil service laws to politicize basic functions of law enforcement.

The Trump administration and Attorney General Todd Blanche have argued that the president has inherent authority to fire any executive branch employee at any time and does not need to say why or conduct a formal review of the employee’s conduct. The lawsuit was filed against Patel, Blanche, the FBI and the Justice Department.

It calls that policy “an invention of the current administration” that amounts to “an attempt to convert all federal employees into political appointees and condition their continued employment on their (perceived) personal and political loyalty to President Trump.”

In a written statement, lawyers for the fired employees said the employees had worked on a host of important cases, including the Boston Marathon bombing, the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Iranian weapons trafficking.

“In return for their service, they were fired because they did their jobs, as they always did, to follow the facts and law without bias or favor,” said their lawyers, Margaret Donovan, Abbe D. Lowell and Rebecca S. Tinio. “This lawsuit will prove their unlawful dismissal and hold the administration accountable for this blatant attack on the rule of law.”

The lawsuit notes that the firings came just days before the United States entered into a war against Iran, an adversary that many of the fired personnel had experience investigating.

In mid-2025, Jennifer Bacon was a senior FBI official when she gave a counterintelligence presentation to security officials in Australia. Afterward, Patel “thanked her for her excellent work,” according to the lawsuit.

Harrison Kaufman, a former staff operations specialist, was congratulated by the director late last year after he worked on the investigation into pipe bombs left outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

“Director Patel personally shook Kaufman’s hand and thanked him for his work before the arrest and search warrants were executed,” the lawsuit said.

Jeremy Linton worked at the FBI as a crisis negotiator. After the 2025 arrest of a suspected member of the MS-13 gang, Patel “shook Linton’s hand, posed for a photograph with Linton and the operational team, and later sent Linton a signed copy of the photograph as a memento,” the lawsuit said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Devlin Barrett
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