THE NEW YORK TIMES: FBI fires agents who knelt during racial justice protests

Kash Patel, the FBI director, fired roughly 20 agents Friday, including those who knelt during protests for racial justice in 2020, according to people familiar with the matter.

The dismissals are part of a long-running purge of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Bureau veterans say high-performing agents are being fired without cause or due process.

Last month, Patel fired a handful of senior agents, prompting top officials to sue the administration, accusing it of conducting a “campaign of retribution” against employees who were assigned to investigate Mr Trump, his advisers or supporters.

Those fired Friday include agents who appeared in photographs taking a knee at demonstrations that erupted in the wake of the May 2020 killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The officer was later convicted of murder, and three other officers were convicted of civil rights crimes related to the killing.

In April, the bureau reassigned several female agents in supervisory positions who had been pictured kneeling.

An FBI spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The FBI Agents Association condemned the dismissals, casting them as part of a “dangerous pattern” of “weakening the bureau” by ignoring federal law to force out experienced investigators.

Patel, the group said, “chose to again violate the law by ignoring these agents’ constitutional and legal rights instead of following the requisite process.”

“Leaders uphold the law — they don’t repeatedly break it,” the group added. “They respect due process, rather than hide from it.”

It urged Congress to investigate the frequent agent firings.

Before becoming FBI director, Patel railed for years against the bureau, vowing to close its aging headquarters building and fire its leaders. In a social media post Friday, he declared that he was “finding and producing materials exposing corruption at record levels.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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