After a delay of five years, the FBI has finally fired a group of FBI agents who knelt in solidarity with rioters in Washington, D.C. in June 2020. The firings come after a lengthy investigation by the FBI’s inspection division and recommendations evaluated by the bureau’s general counsel’s office.

During the Mostly Peaceful™ George Floyd demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in June 2020, a group of FBI agents was photographed kneeling.    

This photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was taken contemporaneously with the FBI photograph.

The defenders of the 15-20 agents dismissed for participating in this incident are framing it as an incident involving untrained agents doing the best they could.

Trump and then-Attorney General William P. Barr had deployed agents, mostly from the FBI’s Washington field office, in response to the mostly peaceful demonstrations [NOTE: they actually wrote that] across the nation’s capital. They said they were needed to deter rioters or vandals seeking to destroy federal property, as had happened in some cities such as Portland, Oregon.

But critics derided the images as what they viewed as a group of agents expressing solidarity with the protests. They pointed to the photographs as proof of a liberal bias in the FBI.

The agents’ defenders maintained that the photos depicted nothing more than bureau personnel injected into a charged atmosphere between protesters and police and attempting to do anything to de-escalate before a tense situation boiled over.

At best, this was a display of abject cowardice. Rather than do their jobs, they elected to take a hard pass. There is no evidence that the demonstrators were menacing the FBI building, so preemptively running up the white flag seems quite craven. At its worst, the kneeling agents changed sides during a civil disturbance and threw in their lot with the demonstrators/rioters. This act of disloyalty requires punishment if for no other reason than to lay down a marker for the rest of the organization. At that point, the public had every right to doubt whose side the FBI was on during the rioting. The fat agent should be fired out of general principle.

Lawsuits are sure to follow. But until those play out later in the decade, these agents will remain fired.

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