KOLUMN Magazine
When De-Escalation Becomes Dissent
The kneeling FBI agents of June 2020 thought they were preventing bloodshed. In court papers, they now argue they were punished for not standing with Trump.
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On a hot June afternoon in 2020, the line between “tactical judgment” and “political act” was about the width of a sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Twenty-two FBI agents from the Washington Field Office had been sent downtown with little more than pistols, radios and soft body armor. No shields. No helmets. No real training in crowd control. The protests that followed the murder of George Floyd had turned the capital’s streets into a rolling, sometimes volatile, civic seminar on policing and race.
Near the National Archives, the agents found themselves pinned against a wall by a crowd that knew exactly who they were. Chants—angry, insistent—rolled over them: Take a knee. Take a knee. Some protesters shouted; others filmed on their phones, the now-familiar black rectangles held aloft like a thousand tiny searchlights.
The agents, outnumbered and keenly aware that their only real “less-lethal” option was to unholster a gun and hope, made a choice. One of them dropped to a knee. Then another. Then, almost in unison, the line followed. The crowd’s mood shifted. People cheered, snapped photos, moved on. No tear gas. No baton swings. No gunfire. According to their lawsuit, the agents believed they had just prevented what they later called, in a flourish of rhetoric, a “Washington Massacre” that might have echoed the Boston one.
The photo—federal agents kneeling in tactical gear beside demonstrators on Pennsylvania Avenue—shot around the world. Depending on who was looking, it was either a rare glimpse of federal power listening to public pain, or proof that the FBI had gone “woke.”
Five years later, a different image defines those same agents’ lives: not the viral photo from the street, but the grainy security camera footage at the entrance to the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., where twelve of them—no longer FBI employees—filed suit on a Monday morning in December 2025, accusing their own former director of unlawful, politically motivated retaliation.
Their complaint reads less like a personnel dispute than a case study in how a single moment, frozen on camera, can be re-interpreted—and weaponized—by a changing administration.
The Photo and the Crowd
George Floyd had been killed barely a week when then-Attorney General William Barr ordered waves of federal agents, including FBI personnel, into Washington’s streets. The mission was deliberately vague: a “visible law enforcement presence” meant to project order in an anxious capital.
According to the lawsuit, the 22 FBI agents dispatched from the Washington Field Office on June 4, 2020, were reassigned from their regular squads and deployed into a role they’d never really trained for. As they turned a corner near the Archives, a crowd recognized them—not as anonymous officers in riot gear, but as the FBI. People surged toward them, shouting and gesturing. The agents felt the energy tipping toward something more dangerous.
The suit describes the moment in clinical language: a “hostile crowd,” an “absence of adequate crowd-control equipment,” the agents backed up against a wall with little space to maneuver. The chant—take a knee—spread rapidly through the crowd. The agents, weighing their options, concluded that kneeling was the least risky way to avoid a confrontation they feared could end with someone dead.
What happened next is, as far as the contemporaneous record goes, uncontested. They knelt. The crowd cheered. Tension drained from the air. People moved on. The agents stayed on duty. No shots were fired. No injuries recorded.
Inside the bureau, the move initially registered as exactly what the agents say it was: a tactical call in a fast-moving situation. An internal review overseen by the then-deputy director concluded that the agents had no political motive and should not be disciplined. The Justice Department’s inspector general reached a similar conclusion, even criticizing senior officials for putting agents in that position without better preparation or equipment.
Outside the building, though, the image took on a different life. On social media and conservative talk shows, the kneeling agents were cast as foot soldiers of a politicized FBI—a symbol of a federal law enforcement culture supposedly drifting toward the left. Years later, the lawsuit notes, Donald Trump himself would resurface the image on his social media platform, amplifying claims that the agents were rewarded with “plum” postings for what critics called a stunt.
In that sense, the dozen agents now in court are suing not only over the discipline that eventually followed, but over the political meaning imposed on a moment they insist was purely about survival.
The Lives Behind the Lawsuit
The twelve plaintiffs are not named in their complaint or in the major news accounts that followed its filing; nine of them, the lawsuit says, are women. They come from different squads in the Washington Field Office and were, until last fall, career special agents—civil servants who expected to ride out one administration after another, insulated by law from political swings at the top.
That anonymity was once a form of protection. FBI agents joke that if people know your name, something in your career has probably gone wrong. Yet these twelve agents now exist in a strange public-private limbo: identified to the federal court, known to their lawyers and former supervisors, but described only in aggregate to the outside world as “plaintiffs” who insist that one kneeling gesture was meant to keep people safe, not send a message.
Their lawsuit, and the reporting that has followed, offers glimpses of their mindset. They portray themselves as professionals caught in a confluence of events—a viral photograph, a cultural reckoning, and, eventually, a change in the bureau’s leadership. Their decision to kneel, they argue, was no different in form from hundreds of snap tactical judgments made every day in the field, rooted in training that values de-escalation where possible and force only as a last resort.
“To them,” says one civil-rights lawyer who has reviewed the complaint but is not involved in the case, “this was a moment where the bureau’s stated values—saving lives, minimizing harm—collided with the politics of the street and then with the politics of the White House.” (The lawyer spoke generally and not about any confidential communications.)
The suit’s language is, at times, almost elegiac. The agents describe having to pick between “deadly force—the only force available to them as a practical matter”—and a kneeling gesture that they believed would defuse the crowd. They insist they chose correctly and that both the FBI’s original review and the inspector general backed them up. What changed, they say, was not the facts of June 4, 2020, but the political climate in which those facts were later evaluated.
Enter Kash Patel
The central figure in that shift is Kashyap “Kash” Patel, a former public defender turned national-security official turned Trump loyalist, who was confirmed as FBI director in February 2025 after a bruising Senate fight.
Patel had built a public identity as a critic of what he called the “deep state,” arguing that elements within the FBI and intelligence community were hostile to Trump and his agenda. In a memoir published before his confirmation, he detailed what he viewed as politicized abuses inside the bureau and appended a list of 60 current and former officials he labeled “government gangsters”—a roster widely described, including by some senators at his confirmation hearing, as an enemies list.
Once in office, Patel moved aggressively. According to reporting in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets, he set about reshaping the bureau’s leadership ranks, reassigning hundreds of agents, relocating units out of Washington and, crucially, pushing out officials who had worked on sensitive investigations involving Trump or his allies.
In September 2025, three senior former FBI officials—Brian Driscoll, Steven Jensen and Spencer Evans—filed their own lawsuit against Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, alleging that they had been fired for their roles in Trump-related probes and that Patel privately acknowledged those firings were retaliatory even as he denied that under oath.
The kneeling agents’ lawsuit slots neatly into that emerging pattern. Where the earlier case focuses on high-ranking figures at the top of the bureau, the new suit is about line agents whose careers were derailed, they say, not because of any misconduct but because a new director and a returning president saw political disloyalty where they believed they had shown restraint.
From Internal Review to Purge
For years after the protests, the kneeling episode sat in the FBI’s files as a near-miss that could have been worse. The internal review and the inspector general’s report both concluded that the agents had not engaged in political expression. No discipline. No black mark in their personnel jackets.
That changed after Patel walked into the Hoover Building.
According to the lawsuit and to detailed accounts in Reuters, Newsweek and the Associated Press, multiple agents who appeared in the kneeling photo were quietly removed from supervisory roles in the spring of 2025 and reassigned. Around the same time, a new disciplinary inquiry was opened, this one under Patel’s watch.
The suit alleges that Patel ordered Steven Jensen—then head of the Washington Field Office and now himself a plaintiff in the separate senior-officials case—to generate a list of all agents who had knelt that day. Jensen, the lawsuit says, persuaded Patel to reopen an internal investigation first, rather than move directly to firings. Interviews were conducted. Agents again explained why they had knelt. No findings were announced.
Then, in September, while that process was still pending, twelve agents received terse termination letters. They were told they had engaged in “unprofessional conduct” and displayed a “lack of impartiality,” contributing to what the letter described as the “political weaponization of government.” Patel asserted in the letters that he had reviewed the full investigative record. The agents say that record, if properly read, exonerated them.
In their lawsuit, the agents argue that the official rationale was pretext. They contend that senior FBI leadership and the Trump White House had fixated on the kneeling image as a symbol of internal dissent—and that Trump himself amplified that perception on social media, complaining that the kneeling agents had been promoted rather than punished.
“The defendants targeted plaintiffs in particular,” the complaint says, “because of plaintiffs’ use of de-escalation with civilians that defendants perceived as opposed to, or otherwise not affiliated with, President Trump.”
The FBI has declined to comment on the case, citing ongoing litigation.
A Broader Climate of Retaliation
The kneeling agents’ lawsuit lands amid a broader wave of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s personnel practices across the federal government.
In early December, the ACLU of the District of Columbia filed a class-action suit on behalf of former federal employees whom it says were pushed out or sidelined for their involvement in diversity, equity and inclusion work or for perceived political leanings. That complaint alleges widespread First Amendment violations and discrimination across multiple agencies.
Inside the FBI, Patel’s critics—including some retired agents and Justice Department officials—have accused him of transforming the bureau’s civil-service protections into something closer to at-will employment, where ideological conformity is prized and suspected dissent is cause for dismissal. His defenders counter that he is finally holding to account an institution they say had itself become political long before he arrived.
The kneeling case crystallizes that debate. If a federal court ultimately concludes that Patel and other officials fired the agents because of a gesture that prior reviews deemed nonpolitical, it could set a precedent placing new limits on how far any administration can go in purging employees over perceived disloyalty.
It could also send a different kind of message down the ranks: about how much trust line agents can place in their own tactical instincts when politics hovers over every decision.
“There’s a chilling effect question here,” says a former senior FBI official, speaking generally about the bureau’s culture. “If you’re an agent at a protest and you have to choose between something that might prevent violence and something that might look bad on cable news, what are you going to pick the next time?” (The official was not involved in the kneeling incident or the lawsuit.)
What the Agents Want
The twelve former agents are asking for what many wronged employees ask for: reinstatement, back pay, expungement of their records, and a declaration that their terminations violated the Constitution and civil-service law. They also seek monetary damages, though the exact sums will be determined later.
But embedded in their complaint is a more intangible request: a correction of the public record about that day on Pennsylvania Avenue. They want a court, and by extension the country, to see their kneeling not as a partisan pledge, but as a last-ditch, on-the-ground calculation made in the service of what the FBI says it exists to do—protect lives.
Their lawsuit compares the avoided confrontation to the Boston Massacre, a rhetorical move that may strike some judges and jurors as overwrought. Yet the underlying point—that the agents were trying to avoid bloodshed in a moment when the city and the country felt perched on a knife’s edge—is not hard to grasp for anyone who remembers that June.
Whether the twelve will ever wear an FBI badge again is, for now, an open question. Federal employment law is a tangle of procedures and precedents. Courts tend to give agencies wide latitude in personnel decisions, especially when national security is invoked. This case, however, arrives with a rich documentary record—internal reviews, inspector-general findings, public statements, and, of course, the photograph itself—that may make it harder for the government to argue that the terminations were routine.
What’s clear is that their story—agents kneeling once in a tense crowd and again, figuratively, in the face of a powerful director—captures the tension of this political moment. For some, it is evidence that the FBI is finally being brought to heel by elected officials. For others, it is a warning about what happens when the line between loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to a president is redrawn from the top.
On a wall somewhere in a lawyer’s office in Washington, the June 4 photograph is reportedly pinned alongside a different image: the agents, dressed not in tactical gear but in business attire, walking into the courthouse, clutching folders instead of rifles. One shows them on their knees, surrounded by citizens demanding to be heard. The other shows them upright, turning to the only institution they believe might still listen.