A dozen F.B.I. agents fired this year for having knelt during a racial justice protest in 2020 sued the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, and the Trump administration on Monday, arguing that they had been unjustly punished for de-escalating a potentially dangerous situation.
The suit involves one of the largest groups of former law enforcement officials to challenge the Trump administration in court over its continuing purge of personnel at the Justice Department and F.B.I. Mr. Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi have vowed to end what they call weaponization of government, which they define as Democratic officials pursuing criminal investigations of Donald Trump and conservatives. So far, that has meant firing many senior career officials, as well as lower-level agents and prosecutors who worked on investigations related to Mr. Trump.
Mary Dohrmann, a lawyer representing the agents filing suit on Monday, warned of the repercussions given that the administration summarily removed about 16 agents who worked on counterintelligence and counterterrorism. “The country is less safe than it was before these F.B.I. agents were fired en masse,” she said.
She added that the abrupt dismissals violated the F.B.I.’s rules, which protect not only the agents but also the country by “ensuring that people who are highly trained and effective are employed at the F.B.I.” Ms. Dohrmann took the case as part of the Washington Litigation Group, which was formed this spring by former Justice Department lawyers seeking to defend the rule of law.
In notifying the agents by letter that they would be fired, Mr. Patel wrote that they had “demonstrated unprofessional conduct and a lack of impartiality in carrying out duties.”
The F.B.I. and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The fired agents, who filed suit anonymously, worked at the bureau’s Washington field office when they were deployed on June 4, 2020, downtown in response to growing protests after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, by a police officer.
Despite their experience as investigators, the agents had never had F.B.I. training that “included law enforcement tactics for crowd control,” were not equipped with riot gear and were “vastly outnumbered by the crowds they encountered,” according to the lawsuit.
At one point, the agents were standing near the National Archives building when a large crowd gathered around them, forming what the lawsuit described as “a mob.” The filing describes “members of the chaotic scene yelling, chanting, waving banners or closed fists, and throwing objects.” Complicating the situation, according to the lawsuit, was that agents were “backed up against a wall” of the archives building.
Some in the crowd began shouting for the agents to “take a knee,” and those closest to the crowd did so.
They knelt “to prevent a dangerous situation in which confrontational or unwitting civilians might make physical contact with agents,” the lawsuit said, adding that the moves were also meant to “demonstrate a level-headed law enforcement presence that avoided the use of unnecessary force against civilians.”
They made the decision “for apolitical tactical reasons to defuse a volatile situation, not as an expressive political act,” after which the crowd moved on, the lawsuit said.
At the time, conservatives on social media criticized the agents, but F.B.I. leadership cleared them of wrongdoing.
Shortly after, the F.B.I. director at the time, Christopher A. Wray, met with the group and said he understood they had “de-escalated a dangerous situation” and was glad they had come back safely, the lawsuit said. Mr. Wray’s deputy director, David Bowdich, also reviewed the agents’ actions, assuring them that they “would not be penalized” for acting to de-escalate any tension, according to the suit.
When the second Trump term began, it became clear the agents had become targets of the new administration.
F.B.I. senior leaders who spoke to Kash Patel soon after he was sworn in as the agency’s director in February understood that he intended to fire them, “and that this decision had originated from the White House,” according to the lawsuit.
Beginning in March, some of the agents were demoted. For one agent working for the F.B.I. overseas, her demotion meant she had to abruptly uproot her family back to the United States.
In June, a new internal F.B.I. investigation was opened into the event, which dates from 2020. In September, the investigators provided their factual findings to the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which would make determinations about whether discipline was merited.
Before that office reached a decision, Mr. Patel fired the agents, the lawsuit said.
In the dismissal letters, Mr. Patel tied what he described as “unprofessional conduct and a lack of impartiality” to the “political weaponization of government.”
“In fact, the exact opposite is true,” the agents’ lawsuit said, arguing that it is Mr. Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the White House “who are weaponizing government for political reasons.”
During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Patel promised senators that he “will honor the internal review process of the F.B.I.” In both this case and earlier firings of senior F.B.I. executives, Mr. Patel appeared to have acted on his own, without a termination recommendation from an internal review.
At the time the agents who had knelt were fired in September, they were working on a host of assignments, including collecting evidence in the killing of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk and cyber operations, according to the suit.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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