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Chris Meyer, a field agent assigned to fly the F.B.I. director Kash Patel’s plane until last month, knew he was in trouble over the summer when a pro-Trump influencer claimed, without a wisp of proof, that he was “THE” main agent in the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation.
Mr. Meyer said he was never assigned to that case. Moreover, he added, he was on a lakeside vacation with his family in Virginia when the F.B.I. conducted its first significant move in the inquiry: the search of Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence and resort in August 2022.
“It was inflammatory,” Mr. Meyer, 43, said in an interview last week. “It was false.”
No matter. Last month, Mr. Patel summarily fired Mr. Meyer and another top agent in the Washington, D.C., field office who had been targeted by the right, Walter Giardina. Mr. Patel did so after being told that the terminations were unlawful and that pushing out Mr. Giardina, who was caring for his dying wife, would be “inexcusably cruel,” according to a lawsuit filed by three F.B.I. supervisors also dismissed by Mr. Patel.
The allegations by Mr. Meyer and Mr. Giardina, reported for the first time in their own words, offer an unusual glimpse into the nation’s top law enforcement agency at a moment of upheaval and intense political pressure. They also raise fundamental questions about Mr. Patel’s treatment of the bureau’s career work force — and why he personally fired two respected midlevel agents he accused of weaponizing the F.B.I. against Mr. Trump without a formal internal investigation.
“We were always told that we would be taken care of and there would not be any retaliation for our assigned work,” Mr. Giardina, 48, told his supervisors the day he was fired, he recalled. “This circle of trust had been broken.”
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The claims add to the scrutiny of Mr. Patel’s actions in the aftermath of the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. They spotlight the concerns of many in the F.B.I. who believe Mr. Patel has prioritized his own interests over protecting his rank and file, and feel increasingly emboldened to speak out to protect an institution that they believe to be gravely endangered. Their accounts come at a time when others at the bureau have described Mr. Patel as a middleman all too willing to execute the directives of a White House.
A spokesman for Mr. Patel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Patel and other Trump administration officials have repeatedly argued that they need to undertake bold reforms and sweeping personnel actions to reverse what they claim was a politically motivated effort by F.B.I. and Justice Department officials to prosecute and destroy Mr. Trump and his allies. At his confirmation hearings, Mr. Patel said he believed that 98 percent of the F.B.I. was made up of “courageous apolitical warriors for justice” who “just need better leadership.”
Mr. Patel returns to Capitol Hill to face congressional committees on Tuesday and Wednesday, when he is expected to rebut reports his job was in danger, and counter criticism from all sides of the political spectrum.
“We would be wise to take a moment and ask whether Kash Patel has what it takes,” Christopher Rufo, an influential conservative, wrote on social media on Friday.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed his job his safe. But whatever happens, it is clear that Mr. Patel’s standing with a skeptical bureau work force has taken a serious hit in recent days.
One episode, described in court filings and by people familiar with the situation, vividly illustrated that dynamic.
Around 10 a.m. Aug. 5, Brian Driscoll, who had run the F.B.I. for several weeks before Mr. Patel arrived, walked into his successor’s office on the seventh floor of bureau headquarters to plead for Mr. Meyer, whom he respected.
Mr. Driscoll, who had already gained folk hero status in the F.B.I. for refusing Justice Department orders to compile a list of agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases, suggested that dismissing agents who had lawfully executed orders from prosecutors would set a bad precedent.
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“Are you really listening to this guy?” Mr. Driscoll asked, referring to Kyle Seraphin, a right-wing podcaster and former F.B.I. agent who made the accusation against Mr. Meyer, according to three people briefed on the interaction. “Are we really allowing him to influence decisions?”
When Mr. Driscoll implored him to speak directly to Mr. Meyer, Mr. Patel refused, those people added.
In his lawsuit, Mr. Driscoll added details to that encounter, saying that Mr. Patel had acknowledged that his own job “depended on the removal of the agents” — like Mr. Meyer — “who worked on the cases against the president.”
The F.B.I. “tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it,” the lawsuit quoted Mr. Patel as saying.
“Agents don’t have a choice in the investigations they work,” Mr. Meyer said in an interview. “I’ve been politically unaffiliated for over 20 years. My only loyalty is with the oath I swore to protect and defend the Constitution.”
(Mr. Seraphin acknowledged to The New York Times that he might have gotten wrong some details about Mr. Meyer’s role. But he said the firing proved he had been close to the mark, adding that it had not been his intention to get anyone fired.)
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Like many agents, both Mr. Meyer and Mr. Giardina are veterans. Both, in fact, saw combat.
Mr. Meyer flew over 350 hours as an Air Force pilot on three aircraft types in Afghanistan. Mr. Giardina, a 1999 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, commanded 100 Marines in combat during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, participating in several firefights, and followed up with a 2011 deployment, as a reservist, to Afghanistan where he interrogated senior Taliban leaders.
Both appealed their firings with a federal review board earlier this month, saying their status as veterans offered them due-process protections against firing not afforded other agents, according to their lawyers Andrew G. Celli Jr. and Dan Eisenberg.
Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino were warned by Mr. Driscoll and others that they might be forced to testify in those appeals, but chose to plow ahead anyway, according to the lawsuit.
Some accusations against Mr. Giardina came from a more powerful source than an online influencer. On June 5, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said an unnamed F.B.I. whistle-blower had contacted his office to question the impartiality of Mr. Giardina, who had attracted notice for his earlier assignments for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Mr. Trump during his first term. Mr. Giardina had also been the agent who arrested the Trump adviser Peter Navarro after he was indicted on contempt of Congress charges in 2022.
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In a letter to Mr. Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Mr. Grassley accused Mr. Giardina of openly making known “his animosity toward President Trump” and suggesting that he may have destroyed records on a government laptop during the Mueller investigation.
Mr. Grassley also claimed that Mr. Giardina was “an initial recipient” of the infamous Steele dossier of dubious allegations about Mr. Trump’s links with Russia “and falsely said that the dossier was corroborated as true.”
Mr. Giardina said he vehemently denied each of those allegations, point by point, in a meeting with bureau officials on July 25, two days after the funeral of his wife, Colleen, who succumbed to an aggressive form of adrenal cancer at age 49.
He had never worked on the Steele dossier, he wrote in a six-page memo prepared for the meeting, and a quick examination of electronic records would have shown he never had access to files in the case. “Inventory records will confirm” he had never been issued a laptop by Mr. Mueller, much less destroyed it, as Mr. Grassley suggested in his letter, he told staff members with the F.B.I.’s legislative affairs office.
When informed of this response, a Grassley spokeswoman told The Times that the allegations against Mr. Giardina came from “disclosures made by multiple credible whistle-blowers” and said her office planned to schedule “future transcribed interviews with Giardina” as part of an ongoing investigation.
Mr. Giardina, who regards his F.B.I. service as an extension of his military commitment, said, “It was unfathomable to see my entire life, which has been focused on family and the F.B.I., to be torn apart in an instant.”
By the time Mr. Grassley went public with his claims, Colleen Giardina’s health was already deteriorating. At times, it seemed like her death and the end of his nearly two-decade career were racing each other on parallel tracks, her husband said.
Mr. Giardina’s wife suffered an adverse reaction to chemotherapy and began to pace back and forth relentlessly as she became increasingly sick. After she was admitted to the hospital, Mr. Giardina asked a nurse to reserve a conference room for an interview with the congressional affairs office in hopes they would conduct a proper investigation to clear his name.
They agreed to the meeting, then pulled out, he said.
“It was a nightmare,” Mr. Giardina recalled.
By early July, Steven J. Jensen, the head of the Washington field office, urged Mr. Patel to protect Mr. Giardina, whom he believed to be unfairly targeted, according to the lawsuit Mr. Jensen filed with Mr. Driscoll.
The director ignored him, and later fired Mr. Jensen himself.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
