Two former FBI agents are suing bureau director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, claiming they were fired for having investigated Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
In the 41-page complaint filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, “John Doe 1″ and “John Doe 2″ state they had been assigned to the Arctic Frost investigation, which examined Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results. The former FBI employees, who are suing the FBI and DOJ as well, claim their firings were “based solely on their assignment to Arctic Frost.”
Trump has made it no secret that he wants agents like them fired, even calling them “total scum.”
Trump, Bondi, “and others who urged the agents’ firings perceived the agents to be politically opposed to President Trump because of the agents’ assignment to Arctic Frost,” the former agents write.
Patel and Trump, they add, also “made public statements impugning the integrity of Arctic Frost agents, with Patel most recently disparaging the agents he terminated as ‘corrupt actors’ who had engaged in ‘weaponized law enforcement.’”
The ex-agents went on to fault Republican lawmakers for exposing their identities and smearing them.
Their firings came after GOP members of Congress “publicly released unredacted documents associated with Arctic Frost, which contained one Plaintiff’s name,” according to the complaint. The legislators “publicly declared Arctic Frost agents to be partisan operatives,” they added.
One agent was fired on Halloween, and the other on Nov. 4, 2025. In the first case, “John Doe 1″ had to “abandon his two young children, already in costume, who were eagerly waiting to begin Halloween night with their parents,” the filing states. The agent had been summoned to the Washington Field Office, where he was fired.
Both former agents had “exemplary” employment records, according to the filing. In fact, “John Doe 2,” who had been with the bureau for eight years, said Patel had even praised him about a month before he was fired. The agent had briefed him on a fraud investigation.
“Good work, keep going,” Patel told him, the filing says.
The filing concludes that not only were the firings a violation of the agents’ rights to due process, but their First Amendment rights to free speech and association, “because they were based on a perception that Plaintiffs were not political supporters of President Trump.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the DOJ and White House for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
The former agents are among those Patel has been purging from the bureau as part of Trump’s retaliation campaign for the various investigations into his conduct.
In January, MS NOW reported that Patel had been removing senior agents and field office leaders, including the acting assistant director for the New York field office and as many as six agents in Miami who were linked to the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.
Just days before that report, Trump had called FBI agents “scum.”
“Kash better get them out, NOW! Radical Left Lunatics put in by the ‘Auto Pen’ and Obama!” he raged on Truth Social.
The White House has denied that Trump is abusing his powers to target perceived political enemies.
“It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponized the Department of Justice, and nobody knows what that looks like more than President Trump,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in September.
Trump, a felon who has also demanded the prosecution of other perceived rivals like New York Attorney General Letitia James, was ultimately indicted due to what the Arctic Frost investigation found. But the case was dismissed after he was reelected in 2024.
