By Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration has fired four additional FBI agents who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The move is the latest in a string of personnel actions targeting employees who worked on probes looking into President Donald Trump or his allies.
One of the fired agents, Jeremy Desor, has been targeted in recent days on social media after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, a Republican, publicly released more than 1,000 pages of subpoenas from Smith’s investigation, code-named “Arctic Frost,” into attempts to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. The subpoenas did not redact any of the names of the FBI or Justice Department employees who were involved.
Another fired agent, Jamie Garman, was initially placed on administrative leave several weeks ago, shortly after Grassley released other records showing that Smith had sought limited “tolling data” from the cell phones of eight Republican senators and one House of Representatives member in the days before and after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The other two terminated agents were Blaire Toleman, who most recently worked in the bureau’s Chicago office, and David Geist, who previously served as an assistant special agent in charge in the Washington Field office during the time of the investigation, three of the sources said. Toleman previously led an elite public corruption squad that was shut down by the bureau earlier this year.
Reuters could not immediately reach the four agents for comment. A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment.
“INACCURATE ASSERTIONS”
“The public has a right to know how the government’s spending their hard-earned tax dollars, and if agents were engaged in wrongdoing they ought to be held accountable,” Grassley said in a statement to Reuters. “Transparency brings accountability.”
Criminal investigations often include reviews of phones’ tolling data, which contains basic details such as the duration and general location of calls, but does not reveal the contents of the communications.
Senators have since accused the FBI, without evidence, of “spying” on them, prompting Smith’s lawyers to respond with a letter seeking to “correct inaccurate assertions” being made by the lawmakers whose tolling records were subpoenaed.
Grassley and other Trump allies have alleged the FBI’s probe improperly targeted a wide range of Republicans, though Trump was the only one who was charged federally in the 2020 election case.
Two other FBI agents also involved in reviewing the lawmakers’ tolling data were fired in October at the same time Garman was placed on administrative leave, three sources previously confirmed to Reuters.
Since January, dozens of FBI agents, prosecutors and support personnel who worked on Smith’s investigation or handled cases investigating individuals involved in the January 6 attack have been fired from the Justice Department.
The FBI’s former Acting Director Brian Driscoll, who sought to shield agents from being targeted for working on January 6 cases, and the former head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office who supervised some of those cases, sued FBI Director Kash Patel and the Justice Department after being fired earlier this year. In the lawsuit, they allege that the White House pressured the bureau to fire people involved in Trump-related cases.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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