Agents who kneeled in 2020 accuse Kash Patel of retaliation and say they were trying to calm volatile situation
Agents who kneeled in 2020 accuse Kash Patel of retaliation and say they were trying to calm volatile situation
Twelve former FBI agents fired after kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington have sued to get their jobs back, saying their action had been intended to de-escalate a volatile situation and was not meant as a political gesture.
The agents say in their lawsuit that they were fired in September by Kash Patel, the FBI director, because they were perceived as not being politically affiliated with Donald Trump. 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.
