Key Highlights
- But they say their decision to take a knee on 4 June 2020, days after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, has been misinterpreted as political expression. The lawsuit says the agents were assigned to patrol the nation’s capital during a period of civil unrest prompted by Floyd’s death.
- Lacking protective gear or extensive training in crowd control, the agents became outnumbered by hostile crowds they encountered and decided to kneel to the ground in hopes of defusing the tension, the lawsuit said.
- The tactic worked, the lawsuit asserts – the crowds dispersed, no shots were fired and the agents “saved American lives” that day.“Plaintiffs were performing their duties as FBI special agents, employing reasonable de-escalation to prevent a potentially deadly confrontation with American citizens: a Washington Massacre that could have rivaled the Boston Massacre in 1770,” says the lawsuit, which was filed by attorneys with the Washington Litigation Group. The FBI declined to comment. The lawsuit in federal court in Washington represents the latest court challenge to a personnel purge that has roiled the FBI, targeting both top-ranking supervisors and line agents, as Patel has worked to reshape the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.
- Besides the kneeling agents, other employees pushed out in recent months have worked on investigations involving Trump or his allies and in one case displayed an LGBTQ+ flag in his workspace. After photographs emerged of the agents taking a knee, the FBI conducted an internal review, with the then-deputy director determining that the agents had no political motive and should not be punished.
- The justice department inspector general reached a similar conclusion and expressed concern that the department had put the agents in a precarious situation that day, the lawsuit says. It was only after Patel took over the bureau in February that the FBI took a different posture. Multiple kneeling agents were removed from supervisory positions last spring and a fresh disciplinary inquiry was launched that resulted in the agents being interviewed about their actions.
