The lawsuit

Nine former FBI employees, among them special agents, intelligence analysts and counterintelligence specialists, filed a 70-page complaint on Thursday, 15 October, in a federal court in Washington. The defendants are the FBI, its director Kash Patel, Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department. The plaintiffs ask the court to declare their dismissals unlawful, order their reinstatement and award the salaries they lost. They were fired in February 2026 within a span of two days, and the complaint says no internal investigation, disciplinary procedure, prior notice or appeal option came before the decisions. The plaintiffs describe the firings as political retaliation rather than a response to professional conduct. At the time of reporting, the FBI and the Justice Department had not commented on the suit.

Allegations about the case files

The complaint places the firings in the context of access to classified material. Jennifer Bacon, then head of the counterintelligence section, learned she was to be dismissed after agent Miles Starr, a member of Patel's advisory team, requested urgent access to the classified files of the 'Plasmic Echo' operation, the code name for the investigation into Trump's documents. According to the complaint, Starr asked deputy director Roman Rozhavsky for authorization on 23 February, acting on the director's instructions. Bacon gave him access to the files except one particular subfile, and the complaint says the material he consulted included the names of the nine plaintiffs. The plaintiffs also say Patel relied on Article II of the US Constitution, which concerns executive power, to justify the decisions. The complaint further notes that the firings came while the administration was criticising Patel for partying with the US Olympic hockey team.

Background to the Mar-a-Lago case

In August 2022 the FBI searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and recovered more than a hundred documents bearing classification markings. Prosecutors said the seized papers included information on military plans and nuclear weapons, and that they had been stored unsecured there, while Trump rejected any wrongdoing. He was indicted in June 2023 on charges of unlawfully keeping sensitive government documents and obstructing the investigation, and he pleaded not guilty. In July 2024 Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, ended the case, ruling that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith had violated the Constitution. Following Trump's victory in the November 2024 presidential election, the special counsel was forced to abandon the two federal cases against him.

A wider pattern of challenges

The Washington complaint is one of several filings by former FBI staff. Three FBI leaders said in complaints filed in September 2025 that they had been sanctioned for refusing to politicise the bureau, including by opposing firings that Patel demanded. Several complaints from agents and senior officials now contest their dismissals, and Patel is named in several of them. In February, Democrats in Congress accused Patel of using the dismissals to distract from a video showing him celebrating the US men's hockey gold at the Winter Olympics in Italy, where he had travelled for work, drinking beer and shouting. The government also faces further lawsuits from fired agents contesting their dismissals.