Nine FBI employees who worked on the Trump classified documents case are suing the bureau, and the timeline in their complaint reads like a satire pitch rejected for being too on the nose. A Patel ally asked for the case files, the firings landed less than 48 hours later, and the whole thing happened to coincide with the FBI director being filmed chugging beer and flinging alcohol around the U.S. men's hockey locker room at the Winter Olympics.
Nine Careers, Two Days, Zero Process
Nine former FBI special agents, intelligence analysts and staff operation specialists filed a 70-page lawsuit Thursday in federal court in Washington, as CBS News reported. They worked counterintelligence. They had been fired over two days in February 2026, with eight going out the door on the same day and the ninth the day after.
Their alleged crime was working on Jack Smith's investigation into Donald Trump's retention of classified records, the case the FBI code-named Plasmic Echo. The suit names the FBI, Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department as defendants.
The complaint says there was no internal investigation, no disciplinary process, no notice, no hearing and no chance to appeal. What did the bureau offer instead? According to the suit, Patel claimed to rely solely on "Article II." That is the part of the Constitution describing presidential powers, now deployed as a magic word that makes due process vanish.
The Files Request That Came Right Before the Axe
Here is the detail that should make everyone sit up. According to the lawsuit, on Feb. 23 an agent named Miles Starr emailed Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky saying he urgently needed access to the Plasmic Echo case files. He didn't say why. He said he was acting on instructions from Patel.
Starr sits on Patel's Director's Advisory Team, a group of agents from around the country who support the director's policy goals. Counterintelligence section chief Jennifer Bacon granted him access to everything in the case management system except one subfile. The files he could see contained the names of all nine plaintiffs.
Less than 48 hours later, Bacon and the others were fired. You don't need a counterintelligence background to spot that sequence. Somebody got the list, and then the list got fired.
The Same Agent From the Comey Disaster
Starr's name might ring a bell. He was the lead case agent who testified in the since-dismissed indictment charging former FBI Director James Comey with lying to Congress. A federal magistrate judge later criticized that testimony and accused the FBI of numerous missteps, including failing to filter out potentially privileged materials.
So the guy trusted to pull the names of the Trump-documents investigators is the same guy whose work on the other Trump-adjacent revenge prosecution got publicly dressed down by a judge. Quality control remains a core value at Kash Patel's FBI, apparently.
To be clear, the lawsuit is an allegation, not a verdict. But these are specific, dated claims about who asked for what and when, and they will have to be answered in court.
A Beer, a Locker Room, and a Convenient Distraction
The suit also floats a theory about timing, and it is the most gloriously stupid part of the whole story. On Feb. 22, Patel was spotted at the Olympic Games in Milan "chugging a beer and, in a display of wild immaturity and lack of personal control, flinging alcohol around the U.S. men's hockey team's locker room." That phrasing comes straight from the complaint, and honestly, it's better than anything we could write.
The suit says the scandal proved politically perilous, with numerous sources suggesting Patel's status with Trump and his job were in jeopardy. One special agent in charge, tasked with telling former agent Zach Feldman he was fired, reportedly guessed that the termination might be related to the news reports about Patel drinking at the Olympics.
Read that again. A supervisor, handed the job of delivering a termination notice, privately wondered whether the firing was a cover story for the director's frat-party footage. And the strikes on Iran began Feb. 28, which means the fired counterintelligence staff were pushed out right as the country headed into a war.
'Cleaned House' Is Not a Legal Defense
The plaintiffs lean on the administration's own words. Blanche, who was deputy attorney general when the employees were let go, said the administration had "cleaned house" at the FBI by firing employees associated with investigations involving the president. The suit says the president made comments aimed at the plaintiffs too.
That is an extraordinary thing to say out loud. Cleaning house of people because they investigated the president is the allegation, and the Justice Department's own number two appears to have described it as a feature.
The backstory matters here. Agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and allegedly recovered more than 100 documents with classified markings. Smith's office indicted Trump on more than three dozen counts. A federal judge dismissed the charges, ruling Smith was unlawfully appointed, and the Justice Department abandoned its appeal after Trump won in 2024. The case ended, and the people who worked it are still being punished.
Not the First, Probably Not the Last
These nine join a growing pile of former FBI agents and personnel suing the Justice Department and the bureau after abrupt terminations. Many of them worked on matters that displeased Trump and his allies.
The plaintiffs' attorneys, Margaret Donovan, Abbe Lowell and Rebecca Tinio, say the group has over a century of combined experience, including leak investigations, thwarting threats from enemies and responding to the Boston Marathon bombing. Their line: "they were fired because they did their jobs, as they always did, to follow the facts and the law without bias or favor."
CBS News reached out to the Justice Department and FBI for comment. The lawsuit also notes that Patel disclosed in a Feb. 25 Reuters interview that his phone records and those of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles were subpoenaed as part of Smith's investigations. Same day, eight firings.
The Dingo Take
The official line is that these nine were fired under Article II, a lawful exercise of executive power with no investigation or hearing required. The facts in the complaint say something else. A Patel advisory-team agent asked for the files, got a list of names, and the names were gone within 48 hours. If that's not retaliation, it's a hell of a coincidence.
Then there's the Olympics angle. Maybe the firings had nothing to do with the director flinging booze around a hockey locker room. But a supervisor handed the termination script guessed they did, and the guy actually delivering the news to his own colleagues is not a conspiracy theorist. He's a fed who watched the clock and drew a conclusion.
Look, the plaintiffs still have to prove all of this, and a court will decide what holds up. But the administration has already handed them its best evidence in plain English: Blanche saying they "cleaned house." You don't clean house of people who did nothing wrong. You clean house of witnesses. Nine careers got shredded so a vindictive president and a hungover FBI director could have a better week, and "Article II" is the best legal theory they've got. Good luck with that in front of a judge.
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