Copyright independent
Four FBI agents had a rollercoaster start to the week after being fired on Monday, rehired later the same day, but then fired again on Tuesday, as FBI director Kash Patel sought to remove agents who helped investigate Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Patel initially fired the agents on Monday, but it is reported that, following pushback from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro of the District of Columbia and others, he reinstated them the same day. But by Tuesday morning, he’d apparently decided to stick to his earlier decision and relieved them of their duties again, The Washington Post reports. Pirro, a former Fox News star who championed Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was rigged, is believed to have defended the agents because they were now working on cases important to her office. The four agents are not the first to have lost their jobs due to the cases they were assigned to. A purge of personnel under Patel’s leadership has resulted in the removal of numerous senior officials and agents involved in investigations or actions that have angered the Trump administration. Last week, Patel fired at least two more agents connected to the bureau’s investigation of efforts to change the results of the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the matter. Patel also fired a senior official responsible for overseeing the FBI’s fleet of jets. This move followed a wave of media scrutiny over his frequent use of the government aircraft for personal travel. Last week, it emerged that Patel, 45, went to see his girlfriend, 26-year-old country music singer Alexis Wilkins, perform at the Real American Freestyle event at Pennsylvania State University. Patel has reportedly become so incensed by the coverage, describing media reports as “beyond pathetic,” that he ousted a senior FBI official who had been with the agency for 27 years. The firings have already triggered lawsuits, with Republican leaders accused of pursuing a political vendetta. Three high-ranking FBI officials who lost their jobs sued Patel in September, accusing him of caving in to political pressure from above to carry out a “campaign of retribution.” The loss of numerous senior figures in the bureau has damaged morale, according to people familiar with the situation, who told The Washington Post. According to a separate Associated Press report, the FBI Agents Association, which has criticized Patel for the wave of firings, said the director has “disregarded the law and launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution." “The actions yesterday – in which FBI Special Agents were terminated and then reinstated shortly after, and then only to be fired again today – highlight the chaos that occurs when long-standing policies and processes are ignored," the association said. “An agent simply being assigned to an investigation and conducting it appropriately within the law should never be grounds for termination.” Senate Republicans last month also accused special counsel Jack Smith – who led the election interference investigation after Trump lost in 2020 – of improperly subpoenaing call logs from nine GOP lawmakers. The records showed who the senators contacted and the call durations around the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but not the content of the conversations. In his report into Trump’s efforts to mislead the American public about his defeat to Joe Biden, which was released in January this year, Smith wrote: “When it became clear that Mr Trump had lost the election and that lawful means of challenging the election results had failed, he resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power.” In a 174-page filing, he argued those efforts included “attempts to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force Justice Department officials and his own vice president, Michael R Pence, to act in contravention of their oaths and to instead advance Mr Trump’s personal interests”. The Independent has contacted Patel and Pirro for comment.
