Newark, New Jersey

Brian Driscoll had been an FBI agent for nearly eighteen years when the incoming Trump administration made him the bureau’s Acting Director. Known inside the agency as “Drizz,”  he spent much of his career dealing with terrorists and hostages, acquiring “just a stellar reputation” according to Rob D’Amico, who served with Driscoll on the Hostage Rescue Team before leaving the bureau to become a TV commentator. 

In 2013, Driscoll was a gunman on the operation that successfully rescued a five-year-old Alabama boy who had been kidnapped from a schoolbus. The case later turned up as an episode of the CBS TV show “FBI Declassified.”

Driscoll’s appointment as Acting Director came about by accident. Someone had inserted his name instead of a superior’s into an online press announcement, and White House staff decided not to bother fixing the error. As a result, he was the man in charge when the Trump team issued a directive calling for the dismissal of five top FBI officials as well as the compilation of a list of those who had investigated the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020.

Driscoll resisted. Agents did not get to choose their assignments, he pointed out, adding that a list like that could end up with thousands of names on it. One name sure to be there, he said, was his own: he had been one of the agents who arrested a January 6^th suspect named Samuel Fisher, seizing multiple weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition from his New York City apartment. (Sentenced to three and a half years in prison, Fisher was one of the nearly 1,600 beneficiaries of the blanket pardon issued by Donald Trump on Inauguration Day.)

Driscoll’s reaction stirred wide, if mostly anonymous, praise from FBI co-workers. Current and former agents honored him with “memes and satirical clips,” the New York Times reported, including a video riff on the movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” with Driscoll as Batman facing off against enemies from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

His response did not go over nearly as well with the new administration. Emil Bove, who had been Trump’s criminal defense lawyer before being named to a senior position at the Justice Department, wrote a memo accusing FBI leaders of “insubordination,” and in a matter of days Driscoll had been formally removed from his temporary directorship. (Bove is now a federal judge.)

The current director of the FBI is Kash Patel, previously known as a fierce critic of the FBI and a prominent purveyor of MAGA conspiracy theories – and for running a charity with the mission of helping the January 6^th suspects cover their legal expenses. During his Senate confirmation testimony, Patel said he had no “enemies list” and would guard the FBI against “political retribution.” Over the past several months, however, bureau leadership has pursued what the Washington Post described as a broad “personnel purge,” with many officials and agents demoted, reassigned, or dismissed. 

Eventually the purge got around to Driscoll. His last day with the FBI was Friday, August 8. “Our collective sacrifice for those we serve is, and will always be, worth it,” he wrote in a farewell message to colleagues. “I regret nothing.”

Posted on August 15, 2025