NewzA brief filed by former senior Justice Department officials says the firings have undermined a “half-century of independence as a guiding principle.” WASHINGTON (AP) — An association of thousands of FBI agents and other groups are backing a lawsuit filed by three bureau employees who were fired last year for their roles in an investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election. A legal brief by the FBI Agents Association is one of five filed by outside parties in the last week in support of the agents, who were terminated as part of a broader personnel purge by FBI Director Kash Patel that has targeted employees who investigated Trump or are perceived as being against the administration’s interest.
Taken together, the filings, including from former FBI and Justice Department alumni, underscore a concerted and bipartisan pushback to the waves of terminations that have roiled the FBI in the last year and a half as Patel has sought to remake the bureau in his own image. The briefs argue that the firings were illegal because the agents were denied due process and punished for perceived political affiliation, and say the terminations contradict decades of expectations that the bureau’s “apolitical, professional career corps of agents” can work on sensitive cases without putting their careers at risk. “The Bureau simply cannot function if individual Special Agents must choose whether to accept a lawful assignment that could later get them fired, or alternatively to reject it and become subject to firing for insubordination.
FBI Special Agents have long understood that they are subject to assignment and reassignment at any time based on the needs of the Bureau,” the agents association, which serves nearly 12,000 members, wrote in its brief. The three agents — Michelle Ball, Jamie Garman and Blaire Toleman — said in a federal lawsuit filed in March that the…
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