Trump administration ousts top FBI official who resisted purge of Jan. 6 agents

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Aug 7, 2025

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A top FBI official who resisted President Donald Trump’s purge of agents who participated in investigations of the Jan. 6 attack has reportedly been ousted.

Brian Driscoll, a veteran agent who served as acting director of the FBI in the first weeks of the Trump administration, has been forced out of the bureau with Friday being his last day on the job, two people familiar with the situation told the Associated Press.

Driscoll made headlines in late January when he resisted demands from the incoming Trump administration for information about FBI agents who participated in investigations into the 2021 attack on the Capitol by thousands of Trump supporters.

Emil Bove, Trump’s onetime personal lawyer who was then serving as a senior Justice Department official, wrote a memo at the time accusing Driscoll and other top FBI officials of “insubordination.”

The FBI eventually relented and provided personnel details about several thousand employees, albeit identifying them by unique employee numbers rather than by their names.

It wasn’t immediately clear why Driscoll was ousted now and if the firing is part of a larger purge.

Spokespeople for the FBI and director Kash Patel declined to comment.

Driscoll, a veteran agent who has worked on international counterterrorism investigations in New York and once led the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, was named acting director in January after Christopher Wray quit at Trump’s behest and while Patel’s controversial nomination was pending.

After Patel was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, Driscoll was reassigned to lead an FBI division that deploys manpower and resources to crisis situations.

The news comes amid a broader personnel purge that has unfolded over the last several months under the leadership of Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, both MAGA loyalists.

Several senior officials including top agents in charge of field offices have been pushed out of their jobs, and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that have roiled the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency.

Another senior agent, Walter Giardina, who helped probe a case that sent the White House trade adviser Peter Navarro to prison, has also been ousted, the New York Times reported.

In April, the bureau reassigned several agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.

Agents who participated in probes of the bloody January 6 riot, which led to hundreds of successful prosecutions, and the investigations of Trump himself are looked upon with suspicion by MAGA loyalists, even though the agents were following orders from the Justice Department.

Trump pardoned hundreds of Jan. 6 attackers, including those convicted of violently attacking police officers and a handful of white nationalist extremists who planned and led the attack, which was aimed at preventing Congress from certifying former President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.

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