WASHINGTON (AP) — Twelve former FBI agents who took a knee during the 2020 racial justice protest in Washington sued Monday to get their jobs back, saying their actions were meant to defuse a volatile situation and not as a political gesture.
The agents said in their lawsuit that they were fired by director Kash Patel in September because they were deemed not to be politically aligned with President Donald Trump. But their decision to kneel on June 4, 2020, the day after George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police, has been misinterpreted as a political expression.
The lawsuit says the agents were assigned to patrol the nation’s capital during a period of civil unrest prompted by Floyd’s death. Lacking protective gear or extensive training in crowd control, the agents were outnumbered by the hostile crowds they encountered and decided to kneel on the ground in hopes of deescalating tensions, the lawsuit said. The strategy worked, the lawsuit claims — the crowd dispersed, no shots were fired and the agents “saved American lives” that day.
“Plaintiffs were performing their duties as FBI special agents, using reasonable de-escalation to prevent a potentially deadly confrontation with American citizens: a Washington Massacre that could rival the Boston Massacre in 1770,” the lawsuit says.
The FBI declined to comment Monday.
The case in federal court in Washington represents the latest court challenge to an employee purge that has roiled the FBI as Patel works to reshape the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. In addition to the agents who took the knee, other employees fired in recent months have worked on investigations involving Trump or his associates, and in one case an LGBTQ+ flag was displayed in his workplace.
After photos surfaced of the agents kneeling, the FBI conducted an internal review, with the then-deputy director 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 placing agents in an unsafe condition that day, the lawsuit says.
Only after Patel took over the bureau in February did the FBI take a different tack.
Last spring several kneeling agents were removed from supervisory positions and a new disciplinary investigation was launched which resulted in agents being interviewed about their actions. That internal process was still pending when the agents received a brief in September saying they had been fired for “political weaponization of the government due to unprofessional conduct and lack of impartiality in the performance of duties.”
“Defendants dismissed Plaintiffs in a partisan attempt to retaliate against FBI employees who allegedly sympathized with political opponents of President Trump,” the lawsuit states. “And the defendants acted summarily to avoid creating any further administrative records that would reveal their actions as vindictive and unfair.”
The plaintiffs are among 22 agents from various squads across Washington who were deployed to downtown D.C. on June 4, 2020, to demonstrate the law enforcement process seen during demonstrations in the nation’s capital and across the country.
The lawsuit claims that as the agents were pushed into the chaotic scene, the crowd recognized them as being from the FBI and “deliberately” pushed toward them, becoming “increasingly agitated” and yelling and pointing at them. Some in the crowd began chanting “take a knee,” which was widely recognized at the time as a sign of solidarity with Floyd, who was pinned to the sidewalk by police with a knee to his neck.
The agents closest to the crowd were the first to kneel. As the crowd’s attention shifted to the other agents standing, other FBI personnel followed suit by kneeling, believing it to be “the most strategically correct means of preventing violence and maintaining order.” The crowd moved on.
“Plaintiffs demonstrated strategic intelligence in choosing between deadly force — the only force available to them as a practical matter, their lack of adequate crowd control equipment — and a less lethal response than saving life and maintaining order,” the lawsuit says. “The special agents chose to avoid casualties while maintaining their law enforcement mission. Each plaintiff 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 to declare the firings unconstitutional, backpay and other monetary damages, and to expunge personnel files related to the firing.
