The Justice Department has paid millions of dollars to settle claims from FBI agents suspended over misconduct allegations, a prominent House Democrat said in a letter Tuesday, raising concern over what he described as the Trump administration’s pattern of rewarding allies with large cash payouts.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) highlighted several of those deals in a missive to acting attorney general Todd Blanche demanding further details on the payments, including settlements with an agent who was disciplined after refusing to investigate a white nationalist group and another who was accused of being present in a restricted area during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Tristan Leavitt, an attorney for those agents, disputed Raskin’s characterization of those cases and dismissed the congressman’s concern as “more a toddler’s temper tantrum than serious congressional oversight.”

Several of the payments cited in Raskin’s letter involve agents who have publicly claimed their suspensions were the result of political bias in the Justice Department during the Biden administration. In several cases, their claims had not yet been raised in court or made their way through the FBI’s internal process for appealing disciplinary actions before the Justice Department offered to settle, Raskin said.

“These checks are just political handouts and payoffs,” wrote Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He added later, “The DOJ and FBI have already paid out several million dollars of taxpayer money to disgraced agents and employees who violated their professional and legal duties to the government.”

Raskin’s letter detailed settlements with five agents, whom he wrote had received settlements totaling more than $230,000. Some of them also received backpay which, in some cases, was hundreds of thousands of dollars. The letter said there were additional settlements that Raskin did not specifically reference in his message to Blanche.

Each of the five settlements Raskin cited Tuesday had been previously announced in August by Leavitt and his organization Empower Oversight, which represented many of the suspended agents in their negotiations with the Justice Department and FBI.

Leavitt, a former staffer to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, maintained in a statement that the payments were appropriate for agents he described as whistleblowers. He accused Raskin of spreading “shameless lies about our clients.”

“It is common practice for federal agencies to settle legal or administrative complaints against them, which … virtually all of the whistleblowers had against the FBI at the time of the settlements,” he said in a statement. “Empower Oversight has been transparent at every step about its case for making these whistleblowers whole, with hundreds of pages on our website documenting the flaws in FBI actions against these employees.”

The debate over the payments made to agents who’ve aided Republican-backed efforts to accuse the bureau of playing politics comes as the FBI’s top leadership has fired dozens of other agents for their past involvement in investigations targeting President Donald Trump. Several of those agents have since sued, alleging that their dismissals did not go through the traditional disciplinary process afforded to FBI employees.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has offered cash settlements to a number of high-profile Trump allies who sued the government after they were charged with various crimes during the Biden administration.

Last month, department lawyers authorized a $1.25 million settlement to Trump’s 2016 campaign adviser Carter Page to settle claims that he was illegally surveilled by federal authorities as part of an investigation into Russian interference in that race. Page was never charged with a crime but multiple federal courts had dismissed lawsuits he’d filed over the investigation, saying the statute of limitations on his claims had lapsed.

The department has also paid more than $1 million to Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has claimed he was the victim of a politicized prosecution for lying to federal agents as part of the same investigation.

“All of these handouts constitute an astounding and lawless abuse of government office and taxpayer dollars,” Raskin wrote.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Among the settlements with disciplined agents that Raskin highlighted Tuesday was a $63,500 payment he said was made to an agent who had his security clearance revoked after FBI personnel determined he’d lied to investigators about his presence during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Though Raskin did not name the agent in his letter, he said that in addition to the lump-sum payout, the agent also received hundreds of thousands in backpay.

Empower Oversight disputed Raskin’s characterization of the case. In its August news release on the settlement, the organization said the agent had self-reported his presence during the riot to his supervisors after he unwittingly strayed into restricted grounds after rioters had removed barriers in their rush toward the Capitol. The agent did not enter the Capitol building or ascend the building’s steps, the organization said.

Others cited included settlements with FBI agents Steven Friend and Garret O’Boyle, both of whom testified at Republican-led congressional hearings during the Biden administration accusing the FBI of political bias.

Friend, previously assigned to the FBI’s field office in Daytona Beach, Florida, was suspended for allegedly refusing to participate in the arrest of a Jan. 6 suspect, illegally recording conversations with his management team, downloading sensitive FBI documents onto a thumb drive and participating in unsanctioned media interviews with Russian state media, Raskin said. Friend resigned from the FBI following his suspension in 2023. Raskin said Tuesday that under a recently struck deal, the Justice Department agreed to pay Friend $61,430 plus hundreds of thousands of dollars in backpay.

Boyle, an FBI special agent in Wichita, was accused of disclosing sensitive information regarding an ongoing criminal investigation involving the right-wing organization Project Veritas, which is known for using undercover tactics to expose what it says is liberal bias in the mainstream news media, when he was suspended in 2022. Though the FBI and courts previously rejected his claims that he was wrongfully suspended, the Justice Department reinstated O’Boyle and agreed to pay him more than $600,000, Raskin said.

Empower Oversight maintains that Boyle’s disclosures were made as part of lawfully protected whistleblowing to congressional committees. The organization also disputed Raskin’s description of an agent disciplined for his alleged refusal to participate in an investigation of the white nationalist group Patriot Front in 2022. Empower Oversight said the agent had raised concerns that the bureau’s investigation was politically motivated.

Neither Friend nor Boyle immediately responded to requests for comment Tuesday.

Raskin said in his letter that members of Grassley’s staff had also participated in the settlement negotiations. A spokesperson for Grassley said the senator has been open about his office’s role in the negotiations for months. Raskin’s “seven-page screed is a disgusting and defamatory attempt to smear legitimate whistleblowers while protecting their Biden administration retaliators,” Grassley’s office said in a statement. “Senator Grassley stands by his efforts to defend and protect all whistleblowers, no matter which administration they blow the whistle on, just as he has done for decades.”

(c) 2026, The Washington Post · Jeremy Roebuck, Perry Stein