WASHINGTON, D.C.: Twelve former FBI agents who lost their jobs after kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington, D.C., have gone to court on December 8 to get their jobs back.

They said their action was intended to de-escalate a volatile situation and was not meant as a political gesture.

In their lawsuit, the agents said they were fired in September by Director Kash Patel because they were perceived as not being politically aligned with President Donald Trump. But they say their decision to take a knee on June 4, 2020, days after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, was mistakenly viewed as a political expression.

The lawsuit says the agents were assigned to patrol the nation's capital during a period of civil unrest prompted by Floyd's death. They lacked protective gear or extensive crowd-control training and were outnumbered by protesters. They decided to kneel in the hope of defusing tension, the lawsuit said. The tactic worked: the crowds dispersed, no shots were fired, and the agents "saved American lives" that day.

The lawsuit argues that the plaintiffs were performing their duties as FBI special agents, using reasonable de-escalation to prevent a potentially deadly confrontation with American citizens—an incident they said could have rivaled the Boston Massacre of 1770.

The FBI declined to comment.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, represents the latest challenge to a personnel purge that has roiled the FBI, targeting both top-ranking supervisors and line agents as Patel has worked to reshape the nation's premier law enforcement agency.

Besides the kneeling agents, other employees pushed out in recent months had worked on investigations involving Trump or his allies and, in one case, displayed an LGBTQ+ flag in the workspace.