gotchanewsdaily.com 
CNN
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FBI employees and the Justice Department agreed to a court order Friday that bars the DOJ from releasing a list of FBI employees who worked on January 6 cases – including the one against Donald Trump – publicly, to the White House or to any other government agency without two days’ notice.
The agreement is the latest in a series of debates over how to protect more than 5,000 FBI employees’ information – gathered as part of a survey and handed over to Justice Department leadership – from being leaked to the public.
Several FBI employees, along with the agency’s union, sued, saying they feared for their safety should their identities be made public. The employees specifically feared that the list would be handed over to either the White House or DOGE, which they said raised the likelihood that names would become public.
Friday’s consent order, signed District Judge Jia M. Cobb, was reached one day after the FBI provided the employees’ names to the Justice Department through a classified system to protect employees from being publicly identified.
“The Government will not disseminate the list at issue in these consolidated cases (and any subsequent versions of that list, including any record pairing the unique identifiers on the list to names) to the public, directly or indirectly, before the Court rules on Plaintiffs’ anticipated motions for a preliminary injunction,” the order reads.
“Absent further order of the Court, the Government may terminate the proscription… at its election by providing two business days’ notice to the parties and the Court of its intent to terminate,” the consent order says.
Cobb had initially resisted instituting a temporary restraining order because the employees were only identified on the survey through and employee ID number, suggesting that the parties consider whether to allow the Justice Department to hand over the list with two days’ notice.
But Thursday night, after a full day of hearings on the matter, FBI leadership said in a memo obtained by CNN that it had complied with the demand from the Justice Department to hand over the names.
Both in memos and in court hearings, the Justice Department has maintained that the department has no intention of releasing the list publicly. Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll said in an email to bureau personnel Thursday that leadership “reiterated once again our concerns for the safety of our personnel, and the risks posed to you and your families should these lists become public.”
