Fired FBI Executives Hire High Powered Legal Talent
Abbe Lowell, Mark Zaid will defend FBI officials forced out without due process by Trump appointees
A group of just fired FBI executives has hired a pair of high powered Washington, D.C. attorneys to challenge their dismissals in federal court on the grounds they were unjustified acts of political “retribution” by Director Kash Patel, sources familiar with the matter tell SpyTalk.
The cashiered agents’ decision to hire Abbe Lowell, one of Washington’s most prominent defense lawyers, and national security attorney Mark Zaid seems destined to escalate tensions over Patel’s efforts to shake up the bureau and purge an ever expanding coterie of veteran agents who have been perceived as insufficiently loyal to President Trump’s agenda.
“This is the high point of politicization of the FBI,” said Chris O’Leary, a former senior counter-terrorism agent who maintains close ties to the bureau workforce. “There seems to be no limit to what they’ll do. I don’t think it could be worse.”
The dismissalsalso come at a time bureau officials and others have been digesting the surprising news this week that Andrew Bailey, the Republican attorney general of Missouri, was being installed in a newly created position as co-deputy director of the FBI. The move has raised questions about what that portends for the controversial existing deputy director, Dan Bongino. (Asked for a response, the FBI’s press office emailed: “We have no comment on personnel matters other than to say Dan Bongino is the co-deputy director of the FBI.”)
The tensions and turmoil within the FBI have reached new heights in the recent weeks since Patel’s dismissal of Brian Driscoll, a highly regarded counter-terror agent who briefly served as acting FBI director earlier this year and most recently was assistant director of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, which among other responsibilities, conducts hostage rescue efforts.
According to two sources familiar with events, Driscoll was recently ordered by Patel to fire Christopher Meyer, a FBI pilot who had previously been assigned to bureau investigations into President Trump, as well as other agents. Driscoll, the sources said, balked at doing so, explaining that there was no cause given for the demanded dismissals.
When he refused, Patel then fired him, an act that sent shockwaves through the bureau given Driscoll’s popularity among the rank and fire. Driscoll, known internally as “Drizz,” had achieved near folk status within the FBI earlier this year when he refused to turn over a list of names of the thousands of agents who worked investigations into Jan. 6.
Driscoll wasn’t the only one who was fired. Steve Jensen, who had been serving as chief of the Washington, D.C. field office, was also dismissed, in part because he, too, resisted firing agents without cause. A third top agent, Spencer Evans, who had been special agent in charge of the Las Vegas office, was also fired after being told that in a previous job, as deputy assistant director for Human Resources, he had been “overzealous” in implementing Justice Department covid policies.
The lawsuit that Lowell and Zaid are now preparing against the FBI, accusing it of violating established administrative procedures and infringing on the agents’ First Amendment rights by firing them for nakedly political reasons, is likely to be filed in the next few weeks. The plaintiffs will include Driscoll, Jensen, and Evans, as former senior executives. Some line agents who were also fired in recent weeks may file a separate action. Zaid is also representing former CIA officials who have had their security clearances cancelled without cause.
Similar lawsuits have been filed on behalf of Justice Department lawyers, FBI agents and other federal workers, setting up a looming judicial clash over a president’s powers to dismiss government employees without specifying any wrongdoing.
Spotlight
But the entry of Lowell into the fray, at a minimum, seems likely to guarantee the case gets plenty of media attention. Widely known for his hardball tactics and masterful press conferences, Lowell has gained prominence over the years for his successful defense of multiple political figures accused of wrongdoing, such as former North Carolina senator and presidential candidate John Edwards, and former New Jersey senator Robert Menendez. In 2017, Trump son-in-law and former aide Jared Kushner hired Lowell, a Democrat, to represent him in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of potential Russian collusion with the Trump campaign
But he is probably best known at the moment for his aggressive representation of Hunter Biden, filing complaints, lawsuits and requests for investigations into the prosecutors and agents who pursued the former president’s son. After the younger Biden’s convictions in two federal cases last year, Lowell laid the groundwork for his client’s ultimate pardon, sending a lengthy memo to President Biden blasting as politically “tainted” the investigative and prosecutorial process that led to his trial and conviction on felonies in two cases.
Lowell and Zaid, who represents multiple former CIA and other intelligence officers, declined comment for this story.