U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to his supporters at Save America Rally on the Ellipse near the White House in Washington on January 6, 2021 (Photo by Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA) (Sipa via AP Images).
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., tossed a lawsuit filed by a group of FBI agents seeking to prevent the Trump administration from publicly identifying those who worked on the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb on Thursday granted the administration”s request to formally dismiss the case brought by two groups of anonymous feds, reasoning that the plaintiffs’ lacked standing, court documents show.
“Plaintiffs’ claims are too speculative,” Cobb wrote in the 32-page order. “They do not plausibly allege that Defendants are about to engage in any of the conduct agents are worried about.”
According to Cobb, the suits were filed amid a genuine “whirlwind of chaos and fear” following Trump’s second inauguration. The situation “escalated quickly” after leadership at the Department of Justice “demanded” the identities of the agents who worked on the Capitol riot investigations and terminated eight FBI officials for “weaponization” after the bureau refused to comply.
“Agents were required to complete a survey identifying whether and in what capacity they worked on January 6 investigations,” Cobb wrote. “And some former January 6 defendants, now pardoned and at large, called for FBI agents to be doxed (or worse). Agents raced to court, terrified that they would be at real risk of physical harm if their identities were somehow made public.”
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However, since the lawsuit was initially filed in February, the “dust has settled some — and this case has evolved,” Cobb wrote.
The court ordered expedited discovery to “cut through the chaos,” which the judge said “that discovery revealed no evidence that Defendants are on the verge of disclosing Plaintiffs’ identities,” and further failed to demonstrate that the Trump administration was “on the verge of disclosing Plaintiffs’ identities.”
“The Court must therefore dismiss Plaintiffs’ disclosure-related claims because Plaintiffs have not established that they have standing to bring them,” Cobb wrote.
Cobb acknowledged that while President Trump had “consistently promised vengeance against FBI personnel who he claims engaged in fraudulent and politically driven investigations of him,” and referred the agents as “thugs,” “tyrants,” and “Gestapo” on social media, such conducts did not establish anything about his future conduct.
“Those statements certainly suggest animus toward some Plaintiffs, but they do not remotely indicate that Defendants intend to take the particular action at issue here— disclosing the list of agents’ names to the public,” she wrote.
The plaintiffs also alleged First Amendment retaliation, contending that the Justice Department’s internal investigation of agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases began “solely because Defendants believe that they are not loyal to the current administration.” The agents further claimed that merely being placed under investigation had adverse impacts on their careers. But Cobb said she could not assess those claims because they were not included in the plaintiff’s amended complaint, only in subsequent court filings.
“The amended complaint alleges only that ‘anticipated’ employment actions, like terminations or other unspecified future ‘adverse actions,’ would violate the First Amendment,” the judge wrote. “Plaintiffs lack standing to challenge such hypothetical, contingent actions. And Plaintiffs cannot amend their complaint via their briefs. The Court must therefore dismiss their First Amendment claims too.”
The FBI Agents Association, a plaintiff in one of the suits, told Reuters that Cobb’s ruling was disappointing and that the organization was “reviewing its legal options.”
“Agent safety has and will always be our paramount concern,” the group said in a statement. “We filed this case to support and protect the dedicated FBI agents and employees who were assigned to investigations related to activities on January 6, 2021.”
