By Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An anonymous group of FBI employees sued the U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday, seeking to protect the identities of those agents and others who investigated supporters of Donald Trump for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Participants in the riots who were pardoned by Trump on his first day in office have taken to social media to identify prosecutors and agents who worked on their cases. Trump pardoned about 1,500 supporters hours after taking office on Jan. 20.
Tuesday’s class-action suit was filed ahead of a 3 p.m. deadline imposed by Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, ordering FBI leadership to turn over a list of every FBI employee who helped with the Jan. 6 investigation.
Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll told staff the list would encompass thousands of employees, including himself.
In the lawsuit, the FBI employees said Bove was trying to identify agents to be fired or otherwise punished.
“Plaintiffs reasonably fear that all or parts of this list might be published by allies of President Trump, thus placing themselves and their families in immediate danger of retribution by the now pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons,” the lawsuit says.
Roughly 140 police officers were assaulted during the attack, with some sprayed with chemical irritants and others struck with pipes, poles and other weapons.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bove fired eight top FBI officials and about 17 prosecutors on Friday who worked on criminal cases related to the Jan. 6 attack.
Acting Attorney General James McHenry separately terminated more than a dozen federal prosecutors who worked on the two now-dismissed criminal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against Trump for his retention of classified documents and his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.
According to the lawsuit, as many as 6,000 FBI employees participated in some manner in the Jan. 6 investigations.
Over the weekend, FBI employees received a survey asking detailed questions about their roles in the Jan. 6 cases with a Monday afternoon deadline.
“I know myself and others receiving this questionnaire have a lot of questions and concerns, which I am working hard to get answers to,” Chad Yarbrough, the assistant director of the Criminal Investigative Division at FBI headquarters, wrote in a weekend email seen by Reuters.
Among those Jan. 6 rioters to post online was Shane Jenkins, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for throwing weapons at police officers and smashing a Capitol window with a tomahawk.
“Here are my prosecutors. Let’s make sure these people are fired!” Jenkins wrote and named the FBI agent in charge of his case as well as the judge.
The calls for retribution coincide with a surge in political threats and violence, including scores of menacing and intimidating messages sent to judges and prosecutors in Trump’s legal trials.
Reuters has identified more than 300 cases of political violence in the four years since the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, including at least 25 fatal assaults claiming 46 victims.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward; additional reporting by Pete Eisler and Ned Parker; Editing by Andy Sullivan and Howard Goller)
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