FBI fires agents pictured kneeling during racial justice protest in 2020

The FBI has fired a group of its agents photographed kneeling on the street in an attempt to de-escalate tensions during a racial justice protest in Washington in 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing by police in Minneapolis, three people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

The terminations came amid a spate of dismissals within the ranks of the nation's most prominent law enforcement agency since Kash Patel, a loyalist of President Donald Trump, was confirmed by the Republican-controlled US Senate in February to lead the FBI.

It was not clear precisely how many FBI agents were terminated on Friday.

The FBI Agents Association, an advocacy group, issued a statement on Friday saying it "strongly condemns today's unlawful termination of more than a dozen FBI Special Agents," but made no mention of what may have precipitated their firings.

The three sources who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity put the number of terminations at between 15 and 22, with an unspecified portion being among those who came under fierce criticism from right-wing commentators for taking a knee during the demonstration.

The agents in question, pictured in photographs and videos of the incident that went viral, were not kneeling in a display of sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement, as critics have suggested, but did so in a gesture to ease tensions between protesters and law enforcement, the sources said.

Some crowd-control measures employed during those protests were more aggressive. Officers fired tear gas and rubber bullets to clear demonstrators near the White House before Trump, then in his first term as president, walked across Lafayette Square to a nearby church and posed for photographs holding a Bible.

Earlier this month, former FBI acting director Brian Driscoll and two other former senior officials who were fired without cause in August sued the Trump administration, alleging they were dismissed in a "campaign of retribution" that targeted officials viewed as insufficiently loyal.

The lawsuit alleges that Patel said he had been ordered to fire anyone who had worked on a criminal investigation against Trump, and that his own job depended on their removal.

"The FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn't forgotten it," Patel told Driscoll, according to the lawsuit.

Steve Jensen, the former assistant director of the Washington field office, and Spencer Evans, the former top official in the Las Vegas field office, are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit.