Agents say bid to compile list of employees who worked on US Capitol attack cases could be precursor to mass firings

Two groups of unnamed FBI agents sued the justice department on Tuesday to block it from collecting information on thousands of agents and other employees who worked on the criminal investigations against Donald Trump and cases against January 6 US Capitol riot defendants.

The lawsuits came after Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, ordered the FBI to compile and turn over a list of every agent who worked on those cases and their roles, which would then be reviewed for personnel decisions.

In the filings, attorneys for the agents asked for the justice department to be blocked from collecting or disseminating the lists. They added that using the information to fire FBI employees would be retaliatory and unlawful and would violate civil service protections.

The filings underscore the uncertainty and trepidation that has gripped the FBI for days. Much of the upheaval has happened in the aftermath of the interim director, Brian Driscoll, saying in an internal memo that he had been ordered to summarily fire eight senior executives at the bureau unless they retired beforehand.

In the same memo, Driscoll disclosed that he had been directed to identify agents who had worked on January 6 cases, sparking fear at the FBI’s Washington headquarters and in other field offices that agents might be fired for having been assigned to a case that angered the president.

The turmoil at the FBI follows tumult at the justice department. The Guardian reported on Tuesday that more than a dozen prosecutors who had worked on the special counsel cases against Trump had been fired last week at the personal direction of the president.

Driscoll has refused to endorse any effort to start mass purges at the FBI, according to people familiar with the matter. But his position itself may be under scrutiny, given that he and his deputy, Robert Kissane, both worked on January 6-related cases.

The first lawsuit, brought by nine FBI agents, was styled as a class action on behalf of as many as 6,000 affected agents who either worked on a January 6 case or in the criminal investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

“Plaintiffs are employees of the FBI who worked on Jan 6 and/or Mar-a-Lago cases, and who have been informed that they are likely to be terminated in the very near future (the week of Feb 3-9, 2025) for such activity,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also showed, for the first time, the questionnaire that affected agents had been asked to complete. Survey questions asked the rank of the FBI employee and whether they had been part of the senior executive staff, such as as a special agent in charge, an assistant director or a section chief.

The survey also asked about their specific responsibilities in the January 6 cases they had been assigned to. Specifically, it asked whether they had arrested suspects, helped with evidence collection, submitted or reviewed grand jury subpoenas, interviewed witnesses, led a search warrant or testified at trial, among other actions.

The second lawsuit, brought by seven FBI agents and the FBI agents association, asked a federal judge to impose a temporary restraining order to stop the justice department from releasing the names of agents on the list and pushed for it to be prevented from getting the list at all.

It also outlined the questions in the survey, but added a curious detail that some of the agents who had been asked to complete the questionnaire had done little or no work on the January 6 cases, while others who did work on the cases had never been asked.

“On information and belief, the department of justice is currently in a state of transitional disorganization and has been unable to verify the accuracy of this basic informational data of its members,” the lawsuit stated.

The second lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of anonymous FBI agents and technical staff – a demonstration of how sprawling the internal review has become – by Mark Zaid and Brad Moss, prominent national security lawyers in Washington, and Norm Eisen, the executive chair of the State Democracy Defenders Fund.