The story of how Brian Driscoll ended up as the acting FBI director is an odd one. After Donald Trump forced out Chris Wray, his own handpicked FBI director from his first term as president, the White House needed a temporary successor at the bureau while Kash Patel worked his way through the Senate confirmation process.
The job went to Driscoll — by accident. Evidently, the White House identified the wrong agent as the FBI’s acting director on its website and never corrected the mistake.
Months later, Driscoll is making headlines again, but for reasons that are less amusing. The New York Times reported:
The F.B.I. is forcing out at least two agents, including a former acting head of the bureau, as the director, Kash Patel, continues a purge at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, according to several people familiar with the matter. Brian Driscoll, who briefly served as the acting director in the early days of the Trump administration, was among those being told to leave by Friday, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe personnel decisions that have not yet been made public.
During his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Patel, a hyperpartisan Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist, declared under oath: “I have no interest, no desire and will not, if confirmed, go backwards. There will be no politicization at the F.B.I. There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI, should I be confirmed as the FBI director.”
I will leave it to others to speculate as to how he managed to deliver those lines with a straight face, but the Times’ report offers fresh evidence of an ongoing personnel purge at the bureau. (The latest reporting has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.)
Driscoll, for example, apparently was deemed a partisan foe after he helped prevent a mass firing of thousands of FBI officials who worked on the Jan. 6 cases. According to the Times’ reporting, he was shown the door at the bureau around the same time as Walter Giardina, who was involved in a number of investigations related to Trump, including the case that sent Peter Navarro to prison, which made him a target of the right.
They’re hardly alone. In June, the FBI also forced out senior agents in Virginia who had drawn the ire of conservative activists. One of them was Michael Feinberg, who had ties to a former agent who appeared on Patel’s infamous enemies list. (On his way out, Feinberg said that the FBI as an institution had begun “to decay.”)
Indeed, these purges have been a staple of Trump’s second term. Just 11 days after he returned to power, NBC News reported: “Trump administration officials have forced out all six of the FBI’s most senior executives and multiple heads of FBI field offices across the country,” in part as retribution for the president having faced federal criminal charges in 2023 and in part to punish officials involved in Jan. 6 cases.
It was the first such stop on Team Trump’s revenge tour, but it was hardly the last.
The Times added in a report published in June, “Behind the scenes, his [Patel’s] vision of an F.B.I. under President Trump is quietly taking shape. Agents have been forced out. Others have been demoted or put on leave with no explanation. … The actions have obliterated decades of experience in national security and criminal matters at the F.B.I. and raised questions about whether the agents taking over such critical posts have the institutional knowledge to pursue cornerstones of its work.” Predictably, all of these developments have had a destabilizing effect. A related report from The Washington Post from last month noted that employees across the FBI have been fired without explanation or warning, “creating rampant speculation and fear within the workforce over who might be terminated next.” For years, the public has been bombarded with hysterical rhetoric from Republican conspiracy theorists who insisted that the FBI — one of the most politically conservative institutions in the federal government and an agency that has never had a Democratic director — had secretly become “weaponized” by rascally liberals hellbent on targeting poor, unsuspecting victims on the right. Those claims appeared ridiculous at the time. They look worse now. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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