Nine FBI agents and analysts fired by FBI Director Kash Patel slipped “all the details” Congress might need to impeach him into their wrongful-firing lawsuit, an analysis argues.
Marcy Wheeler, a national security journalist who runs the emptywheel blog, wrote Friday that the complaint “provides all the details Congress might need to substantiate proof that Kash lied about why he fired these plaintiffs.”
The nine sued Patel, the FBI, and the Justice Department in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, according to the complaint. They argue Patel illegally fired them in February over their work on the investigation into President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents. Their attorneys include Margaret Donovan and Abbe Lowell.
“On its face, this is an employment lawsuit, the kind of lawsuit Margaret Donovan has been filing in bulk during Trump 2.0,” Wheeler wrote. “But in the middle there’s something else: A map to show how to prove that Kash lied to Congress about his reasons for firing the plaintiffs.”
The complaint says Patel told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 19 that firings follow “internal investigations conducted by the careers at the FBI that highlight unethical or inappropriate conduct.”
“In fact, there was no internal FBI investigation into any of the Plaintiffs’ conduct, much less any findings of ‘unethical’ or ‘inappropriate’ conduct,” the lawsuit states.
“I don’t believe so,” Patel said when asked whether the fired employees were “experts on Iran,” according to the complaint.
Wheeler traced the firings back to February, when, in her words, Patel “debauched himself at the Olympics, putting his job at risk.”
A video that spread around Feb. 22 showed Patel chugging a beer and “flinging alcohol around the U.S. men’s hockey team’s locker room” at the Winter Olympics in Milan, according to the complaint, which calls the behavior “a display of wild immaturity and lack of personal control.”
The next day, Special Agent Miles Starr asked for access to the classified documents case files, saying he was acting on Patel’s instructions, the complaint says.
On Feb. 25, Patel told Reuters that his phone records and those of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had been subpoenaed in former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump, the complaint says.
Patel called the subpoenas “outrageous” but conceded “he did not know the FBI’s purpose in seizing the phone records of him and Wiles,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit argues his remarks “appear to have violated the gag order” in the documents case, which U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon oversaw, “based on DOJ’s own interpretation of that order.”
Patel fired eight of the plaintiffs that same day and the ninth the next, the complaint says.
“And based on that, he fired nine people, six of whom had specific expertise on Iran (which expertise Kash also denied to Congress), just days before Trump launched a war on Iran,” Wheeler wrote.
Wheeler pointed out that the lawsuit landed “just weeks before an election where Democrats are expected to take at least the House,” the chamber that would bring any impeachment.
“That’s a pretty damning impeachment-in-a-box even before you get into Kash’s specific exposure in helping his boss steal classified documents, including many pertaining to Iran, or his order to a flunky to go find out what a criminal investigation into his own conduct said about him,” Wheeler wrote.