Who is Brian Driscoll? Former FBI Acting Director Forced Out

A senior FBI official who was briefly acting at the start of the Trump administration is ousted from the office in the midst of a radical leadership purge, two sources familiar with the case said on Thursday. Brian Driscoll, a veteran agent with a wide experience of fighting terrorism, is expected to leave the FBI on Friday. Although the exact circumstances of its withdrawal remain unclear, its release comes when the FBI undergoes a major internal restructuring under the director Kash Patel and the deputy director Dan Bongino.

DRISCOLL was recently interim director of the office response group, which oversees deployments during national crises. He had also managed the elite hostage hosting team and managed high -level international surveys of the New York field office. In January, he was appointed acting director while the appointment of the patel was pending after the departure of Christopher Wray.

Driscoll drew national attention earlier this year while he and then – the deputation director, Rob Kissane, resisted the pressure of Trump administration officials to hand over the names of the FBI agents who had participated in the investigation on January 6, 2021, Capitol Riot. Instead, the office provided anonymized data – identification agents by unique employed numbers – in response to a request from the main official of the Ministry of Justice Emil Bove, who then accused the FBI management of “insubordination” in a memo. Bove was confirmed last week at a siege of the Federal Court of Appeal.

The internal upheaval of the FBI under a patel and Bongino included the reallocation or the forced resignation of many senior officials, including special agents in charge of several large offices on the ground. Some agents would also have been subjected to polygraphic examinations, a decision which, according to the former civil servants, has shaken morale and in -depth internal distrust.

Such a reallocation occurred in April, when several agents who had been photographed on their knees during a racial justice demonstration in 2020 in Washington were withdrawn from their posts, sources said. Another agent, Michael Feinberg, said that he had been forced to resign or accept the demotion after management had raised concerns about his association with Peter Strzok, the former main agent of the Trump-Russia investigation which was dismissed in 2018 for politically loaded texts.

The FBI refused to comment on the departure of Driscoll or the broader leadership reshuffle. However, additional personnel changes have been considered.

This article includes the reports of the Associated Press.

This is news. Updates to follow.