FBI Director Kash Patel allegedly told a top agency official that he fired numerous special agents because “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it,” according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by three former agents.
The lawsuit states that the Trump administration is exercising unprecedented control of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency and illegally directing the firing of FBI personnel.
For example, when the FBI last month fired supervisory special agent Christopher Meyer — a military veteran pilot who routinely flew the bureau’s hostage and rescue team on sensitive missions and had recently begun flying Patel in the bureau’s Gulfstream G550 jet — social media pressure appeared to play a role.
An FBI agent-turned-podcaster had accused Meyer of being “THE case agent on the case resulting in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant,” which the lawsuit states is false.
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“You can’t save everyone,” the lawsuit says Patel told Brian Driscoll, a high-ranking agent who’d tried to block the pilot’s termination, got fired himself and is now suing alongside two others.
Many of the lawsuit’s 68 pages portray the Trump White House as controlling the FBI’s internal workings, with politically appointed officials decrying what they see as “cultural rot” inside the bureau. The lawsuit alleged that FBI leaders used this to justify mass firings and sow panic among agents — even after receiving feedback from Driscoll that this would distract them from solving crimes and monitoring national security threats.
During the first few weeks of the Trump administration, Trump political appointees handed Driscoll a list of people “marked to be removed or terminated,” the lawsuit claims. The lawsuit identifies White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as pushing for “symmetrical action at the FBI as had been happening at DOJ,” meaning a deep-cutting political purge of government employees.
“Directives to fire FBI personnel were coming from the White House,” the lawsuit states.
When approached for comment, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in a statement, “Kash Patel leads the FBI and as the director he oversees and manages all aspects of the agency.”
The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Driscoll, who briefly ran the FBI as an acting director during the start of the administration and was “summarily” fired last month by Patel for “insubordination,” also recalls being interviewed by President Donald Trump’s incoming transition team and presented with a political litmus test three days before Inauguration Day.
The lawsuit claims that Paul Ingrassia, then a “White House-DOJ transition liaison,” called him on the phone and asked Driscoll for his thoughts on the current security threats facing the nation and the structure of the FBI. But then he turned to politics.
“Who did you vote for?” Ingrassia asked, according to the lawsuit.
The legal complaint states that “Driscoll refused to answer this question and stated that it was an inappropriate question with Hatch Act implications,” referring to the federal law that limits the overt political activities of federal government employees.
But Ingrassia pressed on, according to the lawsuit, asking “when” Driscoll started supporting Trump and whether he’d voted for a Democrat in the last five years. Driscoll claims to have refused to answer. When Ingrassia asked if Driscoll agreed that the FBI agents who “stormed” Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort should be held accountable, Driscoll said “no, FBI personnel were doing their job in furtherance of court orders, legal warrants, and a properly predicated investigation,” per the lawsuit.
Emil Bove, a Trump personal defense lawyer who ran the Justice Department during the administration’s first few weeks and is now a federal appellate judge, called Driscoll later that evening to tell him he’d “failed” the vetting interview. Ingrassia described Driscoll as not “based out” enough to meet MAGA standards, according to the lawsuit.
However, Bove at that point was on Driscoll’s side, using his political sway to have the assessment “flipped,” the lawsuit said, and Driscoll, who was slated to be acting deputy director of the entire FBI, was later made acting director after a fluke with the paperwork.
White House retribution on FBI personnel proved swift, according to the three former agents who filed the lawsuit. It details how Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general and technically in charge of the entire DOJ a week into the new Trump administration, kept asking the top two FBI officials to “stay behind” after routine daily morning briefings.
On Jan. 27, Bove told them that Miller at the White House already wanted firings and asked the top two FBI officials to turn over “investigative squad rosters” for field offices in Las Vegas, Miami and Washington, D.C. — which they refused to do, according to the lawsuit.
The next day, Bove told them about his intention to quickly fire the third-ranking official at the FBI, several executive assistant directors and the special-agents-in-charge in Miami, according to the lawsuit. The Miami office had overseen the bureau’s criminal search of Mar-a-Lago, where Trump had hoarded classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021.
Bove, according to the lawsuit, soon told the top two FBI leaders to turn over a list of FBI personnel associated with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol who’d be subject to a DOJ review for misconduct, claiming he wanted to know who was on the “core case team.” Such a team “did not actually exist,” the lawsuit states.
At one point in February, Bove also ordered the bureau to pause all FBI background investigations of Trump administration nominees until after Patel’s Senate confirmation, according to the lawsuit.
The three men who filed the lawsuit had long and distinguished careers as FBI agents.
Driscoll started in 2007 investigating New York Mafias, went on to become a SWAT leader and later worked in the FBI’s hostage rescue team, earning the bureau’s medal of valor award for taking part in an ISIS raid in Syria with Delta Force commandos that saved a Yazidi woman who’d been enslaved.
Spencer Evans spent more than two decades at the FBI investigating drug trafficking and once worked on the release of hostages taken by a Mexican drug cartel. As the special agent in charge of the Las Vegas field office, he oversaw the investigation into Tesla firebombings there in March.
Steven Jensen started out as a police officer in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and later joined the FBI, where became a sniper on the SWAT team and went on to lead the field office in Columbia, South Carolina.
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