A federal judge tossed a lawsuit brought by FBI officials involved in investigations tied to the 2021 attack on the Capitol in a case over fears that the Trump administration would release their identities.
Judge Jia M. Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the case Thursday. Her 32-page ruling stated that discovery revealed no evidence that the government is on the verge of disclosing the officials’ identities.
The FBI officials had asked the court to prevent the government from disseminating any personally identifiable information.
FBI employees filed two lawsuits earlier this year, arguing that releasing their identities would be blatant retaliation from the Trump administration and would endanger the safety of FBI employees and their families. The two cases had been consolidated.
Cobb said the FBI officials filed the cases “in a whirlwind of chaos and fear.” Justice Department leadership, she said, demanded the identities of FBI agents who worked on cases tied to the storming of the Capitol, a violent attack in which pro-Trump rioters temporarily stopped the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential electoral victory.
“Agents raced to court, terrified that they would be at real risk of physical harm if their identities were somehow made public,” Cobb said.
But the FBI officials’ claims were “too speculative,” Cobb wrote, and they “do not plausibly allege that Defendants are about to engage in any of the conduct agents are worried about.”
In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, Cobb had temporarily halted the administration from making public the list of FBI officials who were involved in the Capitol attack cases.
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