WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials are moving to fire FBI agents who participated in investigations involving President Donald Trump in the coming days, two people familiar with the plans said Friday.

Also on Friday, a top Justice Department official ordered the firing of some prosecutors who were hired to work on cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

It was not clear how many FBI agents might be affected, though scores of investigators were involved in various inquiries touching Trump. Officials acting at the direction of the administration have been working to identify individual employees who participated in politically sensitive investigations for possible termination, said the people who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A third person familiar with the situation said U.S. attorneys were instructed on a call this week to provide the names of prosecutors and agents who had any involvement in the hundreds of cases against the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was not made clear on the call why the names were needed, said the person, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

Any mass firings would be a major blow to the historic independence from the White House of the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency and would reflect Trump’s persistent resolve to bend the law enforcement and intelligence community to his will.

It would be part of a startling pattern of retribution waged on federal government employees, following the forced ousters of a group of senior FBI executives earlier this week as well as a mass firing by the Justice Department of prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team who investigated Trump.

The FBI Agents Association called the planned firings “outrageous actions by acting officials are fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI Agents.”

“Dismissing potentially hundreds of Agents would severely weaken the Bureau’s ability to protect the country,” the association said in a statement.

The bureau has a well-defined process for terminations and any abrupt action that bypasses the protocol could presumably open the door to a legal challenge.

When pressed during his confirmation hearing Thursday, Trump’s pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, said he was not aware of any plans to terminate or otherwise punish FBI employees who were involved in the Trump investigations. Patel said if he was confirmed he would follow the FBI’s internal review processes for taking action against employees.

Before he was nominated for the director’s position, Patel had remarked on at least one podcast appearance about the existence of what he called anti-Trump “conspirators” in the government and news media.

Asked at the White House on Friday if he had anything to do with the scrutiny of the agents, Trump said: “No, but we have some very bad people over there. It was weaponized at a level that nobody’s never seen before. They came after a lot of people — like me — but they came after a lot of people.”

The FBI and Smith’s team investigated Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Both of those cases resulted in indictments that were withdrawn after Trump’s presidential win because of longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the federal prosecution of a sitting president.

This week, the Justice Department fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on Smith investigations, and a group of senior FBI executives — including several executive assistant directors and leaders of big-city field offices — were told to either resign or retire or be fired Monday.