Two groups of FBI agents sued the Justice Department on Tuesday to block any public release of a list of thousands of employees who worked on investigations tied to President Donald Trump or the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The twin legal actions, both filed anonymously in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by agents involved in the probes, came as acting FBI director Brian Driscoll told the bureau’s workforce that he had complied with an order to provide information on roughly 5,000 bureau employees to interim leadership at the Justice Department by Tuesday afternoon.
The demand for the names and other details of those who worked on the cases has set off a wave of panic among agents across the country who fear that the lists could be a precursor to retaliation from Trump administration officials and possible unlawful firings.
Driscoll has opposed using the list of agents to carry out a mass purge, The Washington Post reported last week. His memo Tuesday said the bureau had taken steps to protect its agents, including identifying them by employee ID number rather than name in the information sent to the Justice Department, which also included details such as their current title, the office to which they are assigned and the date of their last involvement in a Jan. 6 case.
“I want to be clear again … that the FBI does not consider anyone’s identification on one of these lists as an indicator of misconduct,” Driscoll wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The Post. He said he had stressed to the Justice Department that agents are “assigned to matters purely based on the responsibilities of our jobs” and that the bureau already has a robust process to investigate and handle instances of misconduct.
“I am confident the Department of Justice understands our concerns and will undertake a full and fair review of the data we provided,” Driscoll wrote.
But attorneys for the agents who sued Tuesday weren’t as trusting.
One lawsuit, filed by nine agents who had worked on Jan. 6 cases or special counsel Jack Smith’s two criminal investigations of Trump, asked the court to grant them class-action status to represent all affected agents nationwide and warned that any public release of agents’ names would expose them and their families to retribution.
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The second suit - brought by seven more agents and the FBI Agents Association, a nonprofit advocacy group that represents bureau employees - sought a temporary restraining order that would prohibit public release of the list.
“The individuals being targeted have served in law enforcement for decades, often putting their lives on the line for the citizens of this country,” said Norm Eisen, chairman of the State Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog group that organized one of the lawsuits. “Their rights and privacy must be preserved.”
The lawsuits came hours before Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, was confirmed by the Senate in a vote that split almost along party lines, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) joining Republicans in support.
During her confirmation hearing, Bondi assured senators she would not retaliate against Justice Department staff simply because they’d been assigned to cases involving Trump - a pledge echoed by Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, during his hearing last week. Patel, who if confirmed will report to the attorney general, also committed to following the standard procedures for disciplining and firing FBI employees.
In a memo last week, acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove ordered Driscoll to fire eight senior FBI executives and compile the list of all agents who had touched Jan. 6 cases. He said the information would be reviewed by Trump appointees at the Justice Department and could be used to justify “personnel actions.”
Bove, who previously represented Trump in the two special counsel cases, last week also ordered the dismissal of roughly a dozen prosecutors at the Justice Department who had worked on them. One case involved Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents; the other his alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“The very act of compiling lists of people who worked on matters that upset Donald Trump is retaliatory in nature, intended to intimidate FBI agents and other personnel, and to discourage them from reporting any future malfeasance by [the president] and his agents,” wrote attorneys Pamela M. Keith and Scott M. Lempert of the Center for Employment Justice in one of the lawsuits filed Tuesday.
The suit accused Trump himself of ordering the purge and cited the president’s campaign speeches in which he vowed to seek revenge on those who prosecuted Jan. 6 cases.
“During his campaign for office, Mr. Trump repeatedly stated that he would personify ‘the vengeance’ or ‘the retribution,’ for those whom he called ‘political hostages,’ for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack,” the lawsuit states.
The other lawsuit highlighted media interviews and social media posts from Jan. 6 defendants granted clemency by Trump that appear to threaten retribution against the agents and prosecutors who worked on their cases.
Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the Proud Boys, said that those responsible for his conviction “need to feel the heat, they need to be put behind bars, they need to be prosecuted” in an interview shortly after his release from prison last month that was cited in one of the filings Tuesday. Tarrio and three other top leaders of the far-right organization had been convicted on seditious conspiracy charges before Trump commuted their sentences hours after his inauguration.
Both filings raised the possibility that agent names might find their way to the public even if the Justice Department’s interim leadership did not intend for them to be released. They cited recent tweets from Elon Musk - who as a White House adviser has been granted nearly unfettered access to government agencies - that publicly identified the names of other civil servants, subjecting them to a barrage of scorn online.
“These employees, who have served in the FBI honorably as public servants to enforce the rule of law, must be protected from harm,” Mark Zaid, an attorney in the lawsuit that includes the FBI Agents Association, said in a statement. “The notion that the U.S. government is actually poised to knowingly place its own employees at risk of harm is beyond comprehension.”
Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said the threat of vigilante retribution by pardoned Jan. 6 defendants could be amplified by any release of the names of the FBI agents who worked their cases.
He pointed to Edward Kelley, a Capitol rioter convicted last year of plotting to kill the agents who had investigated him, and Ricky Shiffer, who was present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and attempted to break into the FBI’s Cincinnati field office days after agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents in 2022.
“You have hundreds of January 6 defendants who were convicted of violent offenses against law enforcement, who are primed for violence because of this years-long campaign to demonize the entire FBI, who are looking for an excuse to go do that violence in the name of this ideology,” Lewis said. “When you embolden them by telling them, you are patriots, you’ve done nothing wrong - all of that is the call to arms they’ve been looking for.”
In addition to potential threats to agents’ safety, any mass dismissal of FBI personnel could affect the bureau’s efforts to investigate violent crime and terrorism threats, because most or all of the agents have multiple other cases that are not related to the Capitol attack.
Removing hundreds or thousands of FBI personnel would also deplete experience and staffing levels at the bureau in ways that would be difficult to address quickly. New agents undergo intensive screening and specialized training programs before they can be deployed in the field.
A number of state attorneys general including Kris Mayes from Arizona and Letitia James of New York highlighted those concerns in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. They asked that Patel be called back for additional questioning about the impact that mass dismissals of agents could have on local communities.
But Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the committee’s chairman, called further hearings unnecessary and said he intended to call a vote to advance Patel’s nomination as early as next week.
“It’s … outrageous to assert that a nominee should come before the Senate to answer for government actions that occurred prior to their time at an agency,” he said in a statement.
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Carol D. Leonnig, Shayna Jacobs, Derek Hawkins, Aaron Schaffer and Robert Klemko contributed to this report.