Nine former FBI employees who worked Jack Smith’s discarded Trump records case sued the bureau Thursday, claiming their firings were pure political payback with no real process.
The 70-page complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names the FBI, Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and the Justice Department as defendants. CBS News reported the plaintiffs include former special agents, intelligence analysts, and staff operations specialists who had been assigned to the classified-records investigation once led by special counsel Jack Smith.
They say the February 2026 terminations had no legitimate cause. Blanche has described the moves as the administration cleaning house of employees tied to probes involving the president. The gap between those two stories is now a federal lawsuit.
Smith’s office indicted Trump in 2023 on more than three dozen charges tied to alleged retention of records after his first term and claimed efforts to obstruct their return. A federal judge later dismissed the case, holding that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unlawful. After Trump won the 2024 election, the Justice Department formally dropped its appeal.
The plaintiffs still want their jobs back.
The suit argues the nine were removed solely for their work on the Mar-a-Lago counterintelligence matter known inside the bureau as Plasmic Echo. FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and, according to that earlier case, recovered more than 100 documents bearing classified markings.
Attorneys Margaret Donovan, Abbe Lowell, and Rebecca Tinio framed the terminations in stark terms. In a joint statement they said the former agents and analysts brought more than a century of combined service, including work on national-security leaks, foreign threats, and the Boston Marathon bombing response.
"In return for their service, they were fired because they did their jobs, as they always did, to follow the facts and the law without bias or favor."
Breitbart reported the lawyers went further, calling that service “heroic” and saying the administration treated ordinary case work as an offense. The filing seeks reinstatement, back pay, and a declaration that the firings were unlawful. It also stresses the plaintiffs were assigned to the probe, not volunteers.
The complaint itself puts the core claim this way:
"were unlawfully terminated not for any cause or any legitimate reason, but only to satisfy the President's personal vendetta,"
The Washington Examiner summarized the same action as a challenge to “unlawful and hasty” firings carried out as alleged political retribution against staff from the Trump classified documents case.
Process is the second pillar of the suit. The plaintiffs say standard FBI discipline never happened.
"The firings did not follow any internal investigation or disciplinary process within the FBI, and Plaintiffs were not given any notice, a hearing, or an opportunity to appeal. Instead, Patel claimed to rely solely upon 'Article II' to support the firings,"
Article II is the section of the Constitution that vests executive power in the president. In plain terms, the leadership position is that these were executive-branch personnel and could be removed under presidential authority. The fired employees call that an empty label covering a purge.
Blanche, who was deputy attorney general when the employees were let go and now serves as attorney general, has said the administration cleaned house at the FBI by removing people associated with investigations involving the president. That public description sits on the record beside the lawsuit’s vendetta charge. Readers can weigh both.
Leadership turnover has been part of the larger reset. FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey’s exit after a year in the post fit the same season of change at the top of the bureau.
The complaint builds a tight sequence in late February 2026. On Feb. 23, agent Miles Starr, a member of Patel’s Director’s Advisory Team and the lead case agent who had testified in the since-dismissed indictment accusing former FBI Director James Comey of lying to Congress, emailed Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky. Starr said he urgently needed access to Plasmic Echo files and that he was acting on Patel’s instructions.
Counterintelligence section chief Jennifer Bacon granted access to all but one subfile. Those files, the suit says, held the names of all nine plaintiffs. Less than 48 hours later, Bacon and the others were gone.
Eight of the nine were fired on Feb. 25. The ninth followed the next day. Feb. 25 was also the day Patel sat for a Reuters interview and disclosed that phone records belonging to him and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles had been subpoenaed in Smith’s investigations.
Former special agent Zach Feldman was told of his termination by a special agent in charge. The suit says that official floated the idea the move might track with same-day news coverage of Patel’s appearance at the Winter Olympics in Milan. Patel had been spotted there on Feb. 22. The complaint leans on critical press about his conduct at the Games and treats the timing as evidence of political peril inside the building. It also places the firings as U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran were about to begin; those strikes started Feb. 28.
Separate litigation has also named Patel. A March 19, 2026, federal court filing captioned Does v. Patel shows anonymous plaintiffs taking the director to court, another marker that personnel fights are moving from the hallway into the docket.
Breitbart’s account adds that the firings followed Patel’s earlier public criticism of the Mar-a-Lago search and a Justice Department demand for lists of employees who had worked Trump-related investigations. In the plaintiffs’ telling, that history proves animus. In the administration’s telling, it is how you end a season of politicized targeting.
Smith’s case is not a living prosecution. A federal judge threw it out over the appointment. The department walked away from the appeal after the 2024 election. What remains is an argument over whether the people who staffed that project keep lifetime tenure when voters install new leadership.
Patel’s tenure has mixed structural cuts with operational claims of progress. Bureau recovery teams have blocked more than $1 billion in cyber theft since January under the current overhaul push, a result the director’s side presents as proof the institution can refocus on core crime-fighting.
Older controversies still shadow the building. Declassified material has detailed how prior FBI leadership handled, and, critics say, buried, politically inconvenient evidence, including the Round River operation that treated Biden corruption evidence as Russian disinformation. That history is why many conservatives see personnel changes as repair work, not revenge.
CBS News sought comment from the Justice Department and the FBI. The document does not record a substantive reply in the seed report.
The nine plaintiffs cast themselves as apolitical professionals punished for following orders on a duly assigned case. Their lawyers say they thwarted threats and answered critical incidents without fear or favor. The elected administration answers that the FBI does not get to run protected enclaves against a president the last investigation tried, and failed, to take off the field.
A discarded special counsel case does not entitle its staff to permanent immunity from accountability. Voters hired a cleanup crew; the lawsuit is what resistance looks like on paper.