Washington — Two former FBI agents who helped investigate President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results sued the federal government on Thursday, alleging they were wrongfully terminated simply because they worked on the probe.
The lawsuit, filed against FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi and their respective agencies, is the latest in a growing number of cases being filed by former agents who allege they were fired for political reasons without due process.
The lawsuit does not name the two former agents, each of whom worked on the 2020 election case that was known internally at the FBI as “Arctic Frost.” They are referred to as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 in the suit.
The former agents are asking the court to find that their First and Fifth Amendment rights were violated and to reinstate them to their previous jobs.
The firings took place in the fall of 2025, not long after unredacted internal documents from the investigation were released publicly to Congress.
“FBI Director Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel summarily fired each Plaintiff. No internal investigation, notice, or hearing preceded their firings. Nor were Plaintiffs presented with any evidence purportedly supporting their firings or given an opportunity to appeal,” the former agents allege in the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FBI could not be immediately reached for comment.
In the lawsuit, the former agents said their firings run afoul of FBI policy, which stipulates that agents can only be removed for cause, such as poor performance on the job, abuse of leave, misconduct, national security concerns or an inability to perform their duties.
One of the fired agents was asked to help with the 2020 election probe, led by special counsel Jack Smith, because of the need for financial investigative expertise. However, the work he ultimately performed was “largely administrative and ministerial,” the lawsuit says.
“Despite his listing as a point of contact, John Doe 1 himself prepared very few Arctic Frost subpoena requests and performed only a minor role in the investigation,” it added.
The second former agent, John Doe 2, was also not a lead investigator for the case, and served in a “supporting role, handling tasks such as recording interviews when requested by lead agents or prosecutors, arranging for transcription services for recorded interviews, and keeping track of interview logs and records,” the lawsuit says.
John Doe 1 was informed of his firing on Halloween 2025, as he was about to go trick-or-treating with his children, the lawsuit says.
John Doe 2 was terminated a few days later. At the time, he was working on “a high-profile fraud against the government investigation” and he had just briefed both Patel and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino on the case.
At the time, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro tried to intervene to save the agent from being fired because of the important work he was involved with for her office, but the effort failed, according to the lawsuit.
Since their terminations, both former agents have struggled to find new jobs, the suit said.
Elizabeth Tulis, a partner at Perry Law and an attorney for the former agents, said that her clients “did exactly what they were trained to do: they accepted an assignment from their supervisors and carried it out professionally and apolitically.”
“The government fired them not because they did anything wrong, but solely because of their assignment to an investigation involving then-former President Trump, and a perception that the agents were therefore political non-supporters of President Trump,” Tulis said. “The First Amendment forbids this kind of political retaliation.”
