The FBI fired an agent who was kneeling and taking photos during a racial justice protest in Washington following the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Last spring, the bureau reassigned agents but then fired them, said those who advocated anonymity to discuss HR issues with The Associated Press. The number of FBI employees that were finished was not immediately clear, but they said there were around 20.
The photo in question showed that after Floyd’s murder in May 2020, a group of agents who took their knees in one of the demonstrations led to widespread outrage, leading to police and public calculations over racial injustice after millions of people saw a video of their arrests. Kneeling had angered some in the FBI, but was also understood as a possible evasion tactic during the protest period.
FBI Agent ASSN. In a statement late Friday, he confirmed that more than 12 agents, including military veterans with additional statutory protection, have been fired, and accused the move of being illegal. It called on Congress to investigate and said the shooting was another indication that FBI director Kash Patel ignored the legal rights of department employees.
“As Coach Patel has repeatedly said, no one is beyond the law,” the Agents Association said. “However, rather than providing fair treatment and legitimate processes for these agents, Patel has chosen to violate the law once again by ignoring the constitutional and legal rights of these agents, rather than following the necessary processes.”
An FBI spokesman declined to comment Friday.
The shooting occurs amid the department’s wider personnel purge as Patel works to rebuild the country’s finest federal law enforcement agencies.
Five agents and top-level executives were known to have been fired immediately last month in a wave of outcasts who said current and former officials had contributed to the decline in morale.
One of them, Steve Jensen, oversaw an investigation into the U.S. Capitol’s riots by Trump supporters. Another Brian Drisco served as FBI director early in the second Trump administration, resisting the Department of Justice’s request to provide the names of agents they investigated on January 6th.
The third Chris Meyer was mistakenly rumoured on social media that he took part in an investigation into President Trump’s accumulation at his Mar Lago Estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
The lawsuit filed by Jensen, Driscoll and another fired FBI supervisor Spencer Evans allegedly understood that Patel understands it was “illegal” based on the case in which they worked.
Patel said last week at a Congressional hearing that he received an order from the White House that fired him, and that those fired him were unable to meet FBI standards.
Trump, the only US president to be convicted of a felony, has been charged with multiple criminal charges in two felony cases. Both cases were dismissed after he was elected and indicted the sitting president in accordance with years of Justice Department policies.
Tucker wrote on the Associated Press.
