The Trump administration is forcing out a senior FBI official who resisted demands made earlier this year for the names of agents who investigated the January 6 insurrection, two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
Brian Driscoll briefly served as acting FBI director in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s new term, and his final day at the bureau is Friday, the people told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to discuss the move. Further ousters were possible.
The FBI declined to comment to the Guardian.
The New York Times further reported that the FBI was forcing out Walter Giardina, a special agent who worked on cases involving Trump as well as Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser to the president who was convicted of contempt of Congress.
The ousters were the latest under the FBI director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, who had repeatedly alleged that the bureau had become politicized under Joe Biden. 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.
The FBI Agents Association, which represents current and former bureau staff, issued a statement saying they were “deeply concerned” by reports that senior agents and leaders were going to be fired. “Agents are not given the option to pick and choose their cases, and these agents carried out their assignments with professionalism and integrity. Most importantly, they followed the law,” the organization said.
“If these agents are fired without due process, it makes the American people less safe,” they added, noting that they were “actively reviewing all legal options to defend our members”.
Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said: “The continued purging of experienced, non-partisan FBI agents by the Trump administration is nothing short of alarming. These are individuals who have dedicated their careers to protecting the American people, and their firings are part of a disturbing pattern of retaliation and politicization at an institution charged with safeguarding national security and the rule of law.
“President Trump may believe he can manipulate the levers of power to serve his own ends, but history will not judge this recklessness kindly, and neither should Congress,” he added.
Driscoll, a veteran agent who worked on international counter-terrorism investigations in New York and also had commanded the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, had most recently served as acting director in charge of the Critical Incident Response Group, which deploys people and resources to crisis situations.
He 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 had participated in investigations into the January 6 riot at the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters.
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”.
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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 on 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 Trump with an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.
