FBI fires agents seen kneeling at 2020 George Floyd protest

Consequences continued to be meted out at the FBI as more than five years after seemingly showing solidarity with BLM, roughly a score of agents were let go.

Amid the fiery but mostly peaceful protests that contributed to billions of dollars’ worth of damage and injuries to countless police officers, including the livestreamed murder of retired St. Louis Police Captain David Dorn, some law enforcement officials still saw fit to take a knee in the wake of the death of George Floyd while he was in police custody.

Now, months after a number of FBI agents from the Washington Field Office were reassigned over their participation in a photo-op kneeling during a June 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in the nation’s capital, an Associated Press report indicated as many as 20 agents dubbed “Kneel Team 6” were fired.

Kash fires the FBI Agents who kneeled during the George Floyd era. Glad to see it because, Cops don’t kneel. pic.twitter.com/5SfybHgzFg

— R T (@RDog861) September 27, 2025

The terminations had been confirmed by the FBI Agents Association, which took umbrage with FBI Director Kash Patel in a statement issued Friday, “As Director Patel has repeatedly stated, nobody is above the law. But rather than providing these agents with fair treatment and due process, Patel chose to again violate the law by ignoring these agents’ constitutional and legal rights instead of following the requisite process.”

According to a 2022 report from the New York Post, those agents, who had been on duty at the time, had previously been lauded by management for their supposed efforts at “de-escalation” while the FBI Agents Association had handed out gift cards worth $100 in what was described as an “attaboy” to those who participated in the protest.

Though the FBI had not issued a statement on the terminations at the time of this post, Patel had responded to reports about concerns of agency bias against conservatives from within the bureau amid word that some 274 plainclothes agents had been among the D.C. crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was breached.

“The FBI is continuing to deliver on our promise of ultra transparency. The only reason you have answers is because we are finding and producing materials exposing corruption at record levels. Thank you to the men and women @FBI once again delivering for the American people,” wrote the director. “No one else is on Mission like we are.”

This FBI is continuing to deliver on our promise of ultra transparency. The only reason you have answers is because we are finding and producing materials exposing corruption at record levels. Thank you to the men and women @FBI once again delivering for the American people.

No… https://t.co/GICqfdRNA6

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) September 26, 2025

Consequences for the unnamed agents came weeks after the dismissal of several high-profile officials, including onetime acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, Special Agent Walter Giardina, and Washington Field Office acting Director Steve Jensen.

Meanwhile, amid the bombshell report about the agents who’d been sent to the Capitol on Jan. 6, it had been reported that numerous agents had filed anonymous complaints after the fact, with one calling out the local office as “hopelessly broken” and “more concerned about wearing masks and recruiting preferred racial/sexual groups than catching actual bad guys.”

Another had complained, “We have been used as pawns in a political war, and FBI leadership fell into the trap and has allowed it to happen. We are supposed to call balls and strikes, regardless of political pressure, now we can’t even be trusted to be on the field.”

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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