Search Articles
WASHINGTON (CN) — A group of former FBI agents sued Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday claiming they were fired in retaliation for their work on former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The three agents filed the class action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging their terminations as clear violations of the First and Fifth Amendments, as well as the power vested in the executive branch under Article II of the Constitution.
They claim Patel and Bondi have engaged in a targeted campaign since Trump returned to office in January 2025 against agents they view as political opponents, “as if fidelity to the law and the proper execution of assignments were somehow hostile partisan acts.”
“Defendants’ mission — in their own words — is retribution,” the agents say in their complaint. “They began their terms of office by compiling lists of FBI employees whom they perceived to be ‘enemies’ — due to assigned investigative work, private comments, personal friendships, immutable characteristics or other absurd measure — and publicly initiating mass firings on a rolling basis, without due process.”
The agents point to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s comments at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference that Kash had “cleaned house” and that there “isn’t a single man or woman with a gun, federal agent, still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump.”
The agents say the first time their names and those of the proposed class of other fired agents saw their names enter the public consciousness was when a senior government official “falsely accused them on television or social media of being corrupt, biased or unethical” for doing lawful investigative work to which they were assigned.
“The proposed class members’ true legacy of service — disrupting terrorist plots, gang violence and grift, for decades, without fear or favor, at great sacrifice to themselves and their families — will never make it onto the internet,” the agents say in the complaint.
The named plaintiffs, Jamie Garman, Blaire Toleman and Michelle Ball, collectively have 32 years of experience at the FBI.
The plaintiffs want a federal judge to declare their terminations illegal and to reinstate them to their positions, and to block the FBI from taking any further adverse personnel action without appropriate due process.
In her eight years at the FBI, Garman investigated and disrupted major health care frauds, opioid trafficking and public corruption by members of both political parties and individual defendants.
On Oct. 31, 2025, the FBI terminated Garman without any notice of charges and without giving her the opportunity to respond. Her termination came after she filed a protected whistleblower disclosures and Senator Chuck Grassley disclosed secret grand jury material the FBI produced to the Senate Judiciary Committee that identified Garman by name.
When she was fired, Garman had been serving as a supervisory special agent associate division counsel in the Washington Field Office. Days before her termination, the FBI notified Garman she was in the running for another position.
Toleman served 14 years with the FBI, where she investigated and disrupted terrorist plots, gang violence and public corruption. From February 2022 to March 2024, Toleman served as a supervisory special agent over a federal public corruption squad at the Washington Field Office assigned to Smith’s 2020 election interference investigation.
The FBI informed Toleman on Nov. 3, 2025, that it would terminate her, only to retract it later that day and then again move forward with her termination on Nov. 4. Toleman had been serving as the supervisory special agent of a financial fraud squad in the Chicago Field Office at the time.
Ball worked for the FBI for 10 years, where she disrupted foreign intelligence threats and investigated public corruption, including an investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of a foreign covert operative.
Between the summer of 2019 and February 2024, Ball worked as a special agent on a federal public corruption squad in the Washington Field Office, where she was assigned to support Smith’s investigation. During her FBI career, Ball voluntarily abstained from voting in federal elections.
On Oct. 7, 2025, Ball was terminated without notice of any charges or an opportunity to respond. Her firing came as Bondi testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and while Ball served as a special agent and volunteered for collateral duty as a public affairs officer in the FBI’s New Orleans Office.
Hours before the FBI informed Ball of her termination, Fox News posted an article stating she and another special agent had been fired.
Patel told the outlet the firings were part of an effort “cleaning up a diseased temple three decades in the making.”
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
Follow @Ryan_KnappySubscribe to our free newsletters
Our weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.