WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior FBI official who served as acting director in the first weeks of the Trump administration and resisted demands to turn over the names of agents who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, investigations is being forced out of the bureau, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday.
The circumstances of Brian Driscoll’s ouster were not immediately clear, but his final day is Friday, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss the personnel move by name and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Additional ousters were possible.
Spokespeople for the FBI declined to comment.
The news comes amid a much broader personnel purge that has unfolded over the last several months under the leadership of current director FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Numerous senior officials including top agents in charge of big-city field offices have been pushed out of their jobs and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that former officials say have roiled the workforce and contributed to angst.
Driscoll, a veteran agent who worked international counterterrorism investigations in New York and had also commanded the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, had most recently served as acting director in charge of the Critical Incident Response Group, which deploys manpower and resources to crisis situations.
Driscoll was named acting director in January to replace Christopher Wray and served in the position as Patel’s nomination was pending.
He made headlines after he and Rob Kissane, the then-deputy director, resisted Trump administration demands for information about agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6 riot by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters at the U.S. Capitol.
Emil Bove, the then-senior Justice Department official who made the request and was last week confirmed for a seat on a federal appeals court, wrote a memo accusing the FBI’s top leaders of “insubordination.”
Responding to Bove’s request, the FBI ultimately provided personnel details about several thousand employees, identifying them by unique employee numbers rather than by names.
The FBI has moved under Patel’s watch to aggressively demote, reassign or push out agents. In April, for instance, the bureau reassigned several agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, two people familiar with the matter said Wednesday.
Numerous special agents in charge of field offices have been told to retire, resign or accept reassignment.
Another agent, Michael Feinberg, has said publicly that he was told to resign or accept a demotion amid scrutiny from leadership of his friendship with Peter Strzok, a lead agent on the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation who was fired by the Justice Department in 2018 following revelations that he had exchanged negative text messages about President Donald Trump with an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.