3 fired FBI officials sue Patel, saying he bowed to Trump administration’s ‘campaign of retribution’

Washington – Washington (AP) – Three senior FBI officials were dismissed last month in a “reprisal campaign” led by a director who knew better but who did the political pressure of the Trump administration so that he could keep his own position, according to a federal trial submitted on Wednesday which requires reinstatement of agents.

The complaint says that director Kash Patel said directly to one of the ousted agents, Brian Driscoll, that he knew that the layoffs were “probably illegal” but were powerless to stop them because the White House and the Ministry of Justice were determined to remove all the agents who helped President Donald Trump. He quotes a patel as having said to Driscoll in a conversation last month “the FBI tried to put the president in prison and he did not forget him”.

The trial was filed on behalf of Driscoll, Steve Jensen and Spencer Evans, three of the five agents known for having been dismissed last month in a purge which, according to current and old officials, annoyed the workforce. It represents a legal challenge of the best levels of the FBI leadership scale at a flow of departures under the republican administration of Trump which has destroyed decades of experience. Licensed agents have launched unflattering allegations from an law enforcement agency whose staff movements are shaped by the White House and guided more by policy than by public security.

“Patel not only acted illegally but deliberately priority to the politicization of the FBI to protect the American people,” said the costume. This adds that “his decision to do so has degraded the national security of the country in dismissing three of the FBI’s most experienced operational managers, each expert in terrorism prevention and the reduction of violent crimes”.

FBI spokesperson refused to comment on the trial, as they also did after the agents were ousted.

The prosecution was filed before the Washington Federal Court, where judges and major juries postponed the initiatives of the Trump administration and accusation decisions. He appoints the defendants Patel and the Attorney General Pam Bondi, as well as the FBI, the Ministry of Justice and the President’s Executive Office.

In addition to reintegration, the prosecution seeks, among other remedies, the allocation of Back Pay, an order declaring illegal layoffs and even a forum to live their names. He notes that Patel, in an interview with Fox News Channel two weeks after the layoffs, said that “each person” had found that the FBI had been withdrawn from the management positions, even if the trial indicates that none of the three had done.

“This false and defamatory public smear challenged the professional reputation of each of the complainants, suggesting that they were anything other than loyal and apolitical officials of the application of laws, and caused not only the current loss of employment of the complainants’ government, but harmed their future job prospects,” said the prosecution.

According to the trial, the three licensed officials had participated and supervised some of the most complex work in the FBI, including international surveys on terrorism.

“These were the pinnacles of what the rank was aspired, and now the FBI was deprived not only of this example, but was deprived of very important operational skills,” said Chris Mattei, one of the lawyers for agents. “Their FBI shooting, taken together, put each American at risk than when Brian Driscoll, Steve Jensen and Spencer Evans were in leadership position.”

Another of their lawyers, Abbe Lowell, said that the trial shows that the FBI management “produced political orders to punish law enforcement agents to do their work”.

The most important of the complainants is perhaps Driscoll, a former commander of the FBI specialized hostage rescue team who was acting director between the time when the director of the time, Christopher Wray, resigned in January and Patel was confirmed in February.

In this work, he had a confrontation well published in the first days of the Trump administration with a senior official of the Ministry of Justice, Emil Bove, at the request of Bove for a list of agents who worked on the investigation on January 6, 2021, Riot by a crowd of supporters of Trump at the American Capitol. Driscoll resisted the order in a dispute that led Bove to accuse him of “insubordination”.

Driscoll survived the dispute and adopted another large -scale position supervising the response group to Critical Incidents of the FBI, or CIRG, which unfolds in crises. But new problems arise last month, says the complaint, when an FBI pilot whose functions, including the management of the private jet of the office, were falsely identified on social networks as having been a case agent on the investigation on the hoarding by Trump of classified documents in his Mar-A-Lago field in Palm Beach, Florida.

The complaint indicates that Driscoll was informed that the pilot, Chris Meyer, could no longer steal a patel on the FBI plane. Driscoll has accessed the request, but refused to completely strip Meyer from his pilot functions and fell back when he is informed of the Trump administration wishes to dismiss him.

The trial recounts a conversation from early August in which Driscoll told Patel that it would be illegal to dismiss someone on the basis of cases. Patel, according to the trial, said that he understood that the actions were “probably illegal” but that he should shoot who his superiors wanted him to “because his ability to keep his own job depended on the abolition of agents who worked on cases involving the president”.

Meyer was later dismissed but is not one of the complainants of Wednesday’s prosecution.

One of the complainants, Jensen, was chosen by patel to lead the Washington field office of the office despite a reaction from Trump’s loyalists about his role of previous leadership of coordination of surveys on Capitol Riot. The trial indicates that even if Jensen was publicly defended by the management of the FBI, the patel and the deputy director Dan Bongino told him that they spent “a lot of political capital” to keep him in the post.

In May, according to the complaint, Bongino told him that he should dismiss an agent assigned to his office who had worked on Trump -related cases but also surveys of the officials of the two main political parties. This agent, Walter Giardina, was also one of the five that were dismissed.

Another applicant, Evans, says that he was intended for reprisals on his role as leadership in the FBI human resources division at the start of the COVVI-19 pandemic, which made him responsible for examining employee accommodation requesting an exemption from vaccination requirements.

This position exposed Evans to a barrier of criticism from a former agent who, according to the trial, regularly disseminated his grievances against Evans on social networks and maintained access to the patel.

Evans was among the senior executives said at the end of January to retire or be dismissed, but he received a stay and authorized to stay in his work as head of the Las Vegas field office. Although he was reassured that he had the support of Patel and Bongino, he was said in May that he should leave his position.

On August 6, said the trial, Evans was suitable for a new FBI assignment in Huntsville, Alabama, when he was informed that he had been dismissed. The declared cause was a “reasonable lack of character and zero” in the implementation of COVVI-19 protocols, although the prosecution indicates that he does not remember having ever denied a request for exemption from vaccination.

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