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Lawyers representing the FBI Agents Association and a group of anonymous agents were in federal district court in D.C. on Wednesday asking a federal judge to order the government to destroy a list of thousands of FBI employees involved in Jan. 6 cases that was compiled in the early days of the Trump administration.
Former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll initially resisted an order from then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to turn over a list of names of FBI employees who worked on the cases, instead sending a list of identification numbers. After an additional order, Driscoll turned over the list of names through a classified system. The government said in a recent filing that the Justice Department “has neither accessed the unclassified list of names that prior acting FBI leadership claimed to have sent to the Department via classified email nor reviewed documents or conducted interviews,” but that it plans to conduct a review of Jan. 6 prosecutions that could result in demotions, suspensions or terminations.
Chief Judge James Boasberg allowed the agents to be anonymous, in part citing the threats that they faced, and noted the conviction of a Jan. 6 rioter in a plot to murder the FBI employees who investigated him. The case was then assigned to U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, who conducted the hearing on a motion for a preliminary injunction on Wednesday.
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Margaret Donovan, arguing on behalf of the FBIAA and the anonymous employees, asked Cobb to order the government to destroy the list as well as not to disclose its contents to the public or to the White House. Donovan said that the need for any further immediate action would fade away with an order along those lines, and said that the government could go on conducting a review of the handling of Jan. 6 cases through normal means rather than create the chilling effect of placing anyone who touched a Jan. 6 case on a list up front. The Justice Department was not open to that route.
“I don’t suppose you’d agree to destroy these lists and we could all go home?” Cobb asked one of the government’s attorneys.
“No,” replied Assistant U.S. Attorney Dimitar Georgiev-Remmel.
“Okay,” Cobb said. “Just thought I’d ask.”
Donovan argued that the government has come up with an “after-the-fact justification” for the compilation of a list of names of agents involved in Jan. 6 cases, and that the Trump administration’s moves to “acquiesce” to the demands of Jan. 6 rioters showed their true intentions. On social media, she noted, some pardoned of Jan. 6 charges have been calling for lists of names of Jan. 6 agents, and a government employee who owned a social media company — Elon Musk — had used social media to target individuals before. She noted that Trump has called FBI agents “Gestapo” and “thugs” in connection with the bureau’s handling of Jan. 6 cases as well as the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
“The lives of over 5,000 FBI agents are at risk,” Donovan said, saying that a number of “little red flags” created a “big red flag” about the risk to agents if their names were publicly released.
Donovan said that there was no legitimate purpose for compiling the list and that the compilation of a list before any concrete allegation of wrongdoing is the exact type of weaponization that the Trump administration purports to be against. “Our problem with the process is that there was no process,” Donovan said.
If the government wants to conduct a review of the handling of Jan. 6 cases, Donovan says, they can “have at it,” but FBI agents should not feel as though they are being targeted for retribution when there’s nothing substantive, saying that being on the list has created a “palpable chill and fear” within the bureau.
Questioning Georgiev-Remmel, Cobb pressed on whether the government was simply creating a pretext for targeting agents over the cases they handled, asking what went wrong with the cases that worked their way through the court system.
“I thought I knew a lot about Jan. 6 cases because I had so many of them, but apparently there was corruption,” Cobb said.
Georgiev-Remmel said the internal review was supposed to unveil that evidence, and Cobb questioned whether the government had reached a conclusion ahead of time. Georgiev-Remmel said the government was acting in response to Trump’s executive order on weaponization.
“There’s nothing inappropriate about that,” he said, saying that the creation of a list would be to initiate a review process.
Cobb asked if FBI special agents who were on the list would need to disclose if they were under investigation if they were called to testify in a case, and Georgiev-Remmel replied that they would need to consult with their bosses and seek clarification on how they should respond. Cobb pressed Georgiev-Remmel on whether that would be an injury and whether being on the list would lead to missed job opportunities.
Cobb did not indicate when she would issue any orders.