FBI employees who were removed from their jobs due to their roles in the investigation into US President Donald Trump’s keeping of secret documents at his residence in Florida filed lawsuits today, Thursday, to demand their return to their jobs, describing their dismissal as illegal measures motivated by “political revenge.”
This lawsuit comes within a growing list of legal challenges to the mass dismissals that took place during the era of FBI Director Kash Patel, targeting agents who participated in investigations against the Republican president or who were seen as opposing the interests of the Trump administration.
The lawsuits were filed in federal court in Washington on behalf of nine agents, intelligence analysts and operations specialists who were dismissed in February, after previous dismissals of agents who worked on the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of his loss in the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Patel said in testimony before Congress that the fired employees had turned the FBI into a "weapon."
But these employees deny this claim in the lawsuit, noting that they collectively have more than a century of experience serving the FBI, in a career characterized by distinction and political neutrality, which included tasks such as responding to the Boston Marathon bombing, hostage-free operations, and investigating the 2024 Trump assassination attempt in the town of Butler, Pennsylvania.
The lawsuit stated that their dismissal would cause a “serious loss” to “national security.”
Their defense team, Margaret Donovan, Abby Lowell and Rebecca Tinio, said in a statement: “They were fired for doing their jobs. They were fired because they carried out their jobs, as they always have done, adhering to the facts and the law without bias or favor. “This is a crime in the eyes of this administration, but it is a heroic act in the eyes of the rest of us.”
Democrats hammered hot iron at Republicans in states that had always been classified as red, trying to extract the largest possible number of votes for their candidates in the midterm elections for the US Congress on November 3, after money suddenly flowed into their campaigns.
The announced figures revealed that groups supporting the Democrats are now financially superior to their Republican counterparts, after long months in which supporters of President Donald Trump were lavishing donations on election campaigns in the hope of maintaining the current majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The main Democratic political action committee in the House of Representatives announced that it, along with its allied non-profit organization, had raised $514 million from the beginning of the election cycle until last September 30. This includes $230 million raised during the third quarter alone. On the other hand, the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is allied with Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, announced that it and his non-profit organization had raised $370 million as of October 14.
Millions of dollars
This Democratic advantage comes despite the fact that the Republican Committee outperformed its competitor, allied with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in fundraising during the first 18 months of the session. But the picture changed when non-profit organizations on both sides were taken into account, which are not required by law to disclose their sources of funding.
This does not mean that Republicans are declining in terms of donations; The Congressional Leadership Fund announced that it collected about $94 million between last July and September, which is the largest amount it has collected in any summer quarter. Part of that amount came from two donations of $20 million each made by billionaire Elon Musk and major donor Timothy Mellon.
Fund President Chris Winkleman said: “We have collected more donations than ever before,” adding that the difficult circumstances require the party to be well funded to withstand the blows it will receive. He stressed that he was “frank” with donors about the scale of the challenge, and that this frankness did not harm fundraising.
Democrats need a net gain of only three seats to regain the majority in the House of Representatives, knowing that they have chances to win about 20 seats. In a sign of Republicans' defensive posture, major Republican political action committees stopped spending in at least three previously competitive races, effectively ceding them to Democrats.
A surprise financier
Lawyer and philanthropist Steve Bagsic (80 years old) has emerged as a financier of the Democrats' surprise campaign in four states that are considered traditional Republican strongholds: Florida, Kansas, Mississippi and South Carolina.
Bagsic and his children are spending no less than seven million dollars through a new group called “A New Deal for All,” which was founded in early October to broadcast advertisements in Kansas and South Carolina, and will soon expand to Mississippi and Florida, where it plans to spend the bulk of its money.
This is the largest amount that Bagsic has ever donated, after he gave $147,000 to the Senate Democratic Political Action Committee in 2024. He said that he preferred to manage the money himself instead of handing it over to external parties, explaining: “If I am going to invest this large amount, I want to make sure it is effective and achieves the desired goals.”
He indicated that he chose the name of the group in the hope that the Democrats would win up to 56 seats in the Senate and launch a historic movement comparable to the “New Deal” program in America.
One of his ads in South Carolina targets Republican Senator Darlene Graham, who was appointed to the position after the death of her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham, this summer.
Although Democrats at the national level have begun to shift more resources to red states, especially Kansas, their spending is still limited in Florida, one of the most expensive states in terms of campaign costs, as well as in South Carolina and Mississippi.
Bagsic has long political experience, as he held a seat in the Florida Legislature, and was the Democratic Party's nominee for governor in 1986. He also collected donations for the campaigns of former President Barack Obama.
In other battlefields, the “States Project” organization, which is concerned with electing Democrats to state legislatures, announced that it has raised more than $100 million in this cycle, exceeding the $70 million it collected in 2024. Thus, the organization is approaching the level of the Republican Leadership Committee for the States, which together with its political group raised more than $100 million in the 2024 cycle, noting that Republicans have historically paid greater attention to these elections.
The organization seeks to win a full majority in states such as Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while preventing Republicans from obtaining an overwhelming majority in other states.
