Nine anonymous FBI employees resorted to litigation on Tuesday, filing a class action lawsuit against the DOJ alleging the department improperly asked them and many others to fill out a questionnaire about their involvement in the Jan. 6 investigations. The Trump administration will use the compiled information to fire people, the employees alleged, adding that all nine of them believe they will likely be fired this week.

“Plaintiffs assert that the specific purpose of this survey is to identify agents and other FBI personnel to be terminated as a form of politically motivated retribution,” the complaint read.

At the same time, the FBI Agents Association, the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, and others brought several recent firings and warnings of more to the attention of Congress on Monday evening in a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner.

“These actions, which lack transparency and due process, are creating dangerous distractions, imperiling ongoing investigations, and undermining the Bureau’s ability to work with state, local, and international partners to make America safe again,” wrote the groups, which represent more than 22,000 active and retired agents combined.

The internal turmoil at the FBI began after Emil Bove, the acting No. 2 in charge at the DOJ, sent an ominous directive, obtained by the Washington Examiner, to FBI acting Director Brian Driscoll on Friday asking him to dismiss seven of the most senior officials at the bureau by Monday, the assistant director of the Washington Field Office by Feb. 10, and to provide a list by Tuesday of all current and former FBI employees who had worked at any time on either the vast Jan. 6 investigation or an investigation in New York against alleged members of the Hamas terrorist group.

Bove said he would determine any additional necessary “personnel action” after evaluating the list. After he sent the memo, the questionnaire went out at the direction of the DOJ as a means to compile the list.

The nine anonymous employees said in their lawsuit that they “reasonably fear” that Trump and Elon Musk allies, as well as pardoned Jan. 6 defendants, will use the list to terrorize them.

At least 6,000 FBI employees across the country were involved in the Jan. 6 cases or in Trump’s two criminal cases, according to the lawsuit. That figure represents more than 15% of the bureau’s 38,000-employee workforce.

The Jan. 6 riot prompted the FBI to carry out a wide-ranging, four-year investigation that led to charges against nearly 1,600 defendants. Most of the defendants appeared on videos of the riot as Trump supporters who were protesting the results of the 2020 election, and the majority of them were convicted for a range of charges, including breaching restricted areas of the Capitol, assaulting police officers, obstructing law enforcement, breaking windows of the Capitol and destroying or stealing other property, and interfering with the certification of the 2020 election. Trump granted clemency to all of them.

Bove said in his memo that Trump correctly accused the FBI of committing a “grave national injustice” by carrying out the Jan. 6 investigations in a “weaponized” manner.

Some conservative critics, such as former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, have said the DOJ, which oversees the FBI, was uncharacteristically heavy-handed with the more minor Jan. 6 infractions. But Republicans have widely denounced Trump’s decision to pardon violent offenders.

The firings and job threats at the FBI mark a dramatic escalation by the Trump administration to target the president’s perceived political nemeses. They also come even as the Senate has not yet confirmed Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominees to helm the bureau and the DOJ.

The DOJ’s interim leadership also fired more than two dozen prosecutors at the department who had specifically been hired in Washington to take on Jan. 6 cases and fired more than a dozen veteran prosecutors who worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s two criminal cases against Trump.

As for the ousted FBI officials, they were all veterans of the bureau who were told to retire or be fired, according to Bove’s memo. They included Jeffrey Veltri, the head of the FBI Miami Field Office; Jaqueline Maguire, a training director who defended diversity at the bureau in response to criticisms that it had affected hiring standards; and Robert Wells, who worked in counterterrorism for years before he was put in charge of the FBI’s national security branch.

Veltri had also come under scrutiny by congressional Republicans and numerous FBI whistleblowers, who alleged he improperly suspended security clearances of agents, effectively rendering them unemployable at the bureau for many months at a time. DOJ Inspector General David Horowitz found last year that the FBI’s due process element of investigating embattled employees was, in general, flawed. The DOJ responded to Horowitz at the time by vowing to implement his recommended reforms.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the DOJ for comment on the lawsuit.