Lawsuit accuses Justice Dept. leadership of ‘political retribution’

Two former FBI agents fired last year for having worked on an investigation into President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election accused senior leaders at the bureau and the Justice Department of targeting them for “political retribution” in a lawsuit filed Thursday.

In their suit, the agents claimed that FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi had retaliated against them for being “politically disloyal to President Trump,” even though they had worked on the election interference case, known as Arctic Frost, only briefly and in largely administrative roles.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, was the latest effort by FBI employees to hold Patel and Bondi accountable for the purge of investigators and analysts who lost their jobs because they had taken part in inquiries into Trump or his allies. Dozens of agents and prosecutors who worked on the investigations have been fired or forced from their positions in a campaign of retribution that began almost immediately after Trump returned to the White House.

“Political support for President Trump is not a legal or appropriate requirement for the effective performance of plaintiffs’ respective roles within the FBI,” the lawsuit said. “Accordingly, perceived lack of political support for President Trump is an impermissible basis for termination of plaintiffs’ FBI employment.”

The agents filed the suit, which asks a federal judge to reinstate them at the FBI, under the pseudonyms John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 because they say they have faced threats on social media from members of the public calling for their imprisonment — even their execution. Their lawyers say the threats came after Trump, Patel and others described many of the agents who had worked on Arctic Frost as being “corrupt actors” or taking part in a “political witch hunt.”

Arctic Frost was one of two investigations that were ultimately led by special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed to investigate Trump in November 2022. It resulted in Trump’s indictment on charges of plotting to disrupt the lawful transfer of presidential power in 2020.

Smith also conducted another inquiry — known as Plasmic Echo — that led to a separate indictment accusing Trump of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left the White House in 2021. Both cases were dismissed after Trump was reelected. Nearly a dozen FBI employees who had worked on the Plasmic Echo case were fired by Patel last month.

The Arctic Frost complaint describes how John Doe 1 got a phone call in October from a senior FBI official ordering him to immediately report to the Washington field office. It was Halloween, and the agent was preparing to go trick-or-treating with his two young children, but he left them behind in their costumes to go to the field office, where he was presented with a termination letter.

“You have exercised poor judgment and a lack of impartiality in carrying out duties, leading to the political weaponization of the government,” the letter said. It contained no allegations of misconduct and simply asserted that the agent was being fired under Article II of the Constitution, which details the powers of the executive branch.

John Doe 2 was fired a few days later through a similar letter, the lawsuit said, and despite an attempt to save his job by Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Washington, with whom he had been working on a high-profile government fraud investigation.

The lawsuit accused Patel, in particular, of going back on the vow he had made under oath during his Senate confirmation hearing last January not to fire any agents solely because of cases they may have worked on. And it noted that Bondi had been threatening as early as March 2025 to fire agents who had worked on Trump-related cases.

“There are a lot of people in the FBI and also in the Department of Justice who despise Donald Trump, despise us, don’t want to be here,” she said that month during an interview on Fox News.

“Right now,” she added, “we’re going to root them out. We will find them, and they will no longer be employed.”

While some senior agents with supervisory roles in the inquiries into Trump were ultimately fired, John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 largely did administrative work on the Arctic Frost case, according to the lawsuit.

John Doe 1, the suit asserted, helped two lead agents download information obtained from subpoenas and store it in a shared digital folder where the rest of the investigative team could gain access to it. John Doe 2 was responsible, the suit said, for jobs like recording interviews and arranging for their transcription.

Their lawsuit also claimed that Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the powerful Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, had worked in “apparent coordination” with Patel and Trump “to target and disparage FBI personnel involved with Arctic Frost.”

From the moment Patel assumed his job atop the FBI, it said, Grassley began releasing records related to the Arctic Frost case, some of which had been given to Congress by a purported whistleblower.

Grassley has requested information about the inquiry since 2022 and repeatedly expressed frustration with the Biden administration’s refusal to turn over internal documents. But under Patel, FBI agents have been poring over case files, internal Justice Department correspondence and other sensitive materials to find documents intended to expose and discredit federal law enforcement officials who investigated Trump and his allies.

Even after several rounds of firings, Trump has continued to disparage the FBI agents who worked on the investigations into him, the lawsuit pointed out.

It noted that in January, he posted a link to an article about Arctic Frost on social media and assailed the investigators on the case.

“These FBI Agents are total Scum, in their own way no better than the insurrectionists in Portland, Minnesota, Los Angeles, etc.,” he wrote. “Kash better get them out, NOW!”