A former FBI official who briefly served as acting director has spoken out about his clash with Kash Patel that later led to him being forced out of the agency.
Brian Driscoll revealed in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he underwent a vetting process last year when he got offered the deputy director job at the FBI. But things quickly took a turn when he started getting pressed about his personal politics, including who he voted for in 2024 and when he became a supporter of President Donald Trump.
At one point, Driscoll recalled, Patel told him that the vetting process would go smoothly as long as he wasn’t active on social media, made no donations to the Democratic Party, and didn’t vote for Kamala Harris as president.
“It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” Driscoll told CNN. He served as acting FBI director for just a month, stepping down from the helm of the agency when Patel was confirmed by the Senate in February 2025.
After Patel’s confirmation, he told Driscoll that “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.”
“It was the first time he articulated it that bluntly to me,” Driscoll said.
Around that same period, tensions between Driscoll and the Trump administration escalated when he refused to heed an order to hand over the names of every employee involved in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 rioters and fire eight senior officials.
Driscoll said that order came from Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, who at the time was the acting deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice. Bove is now a federal judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals.
When he asked Bove why he needed to submit the list of employees involved in probing the Capitol rioters, Driscoll was told simply that there was “cultural rot in the FBI,” he told CNN.
“I was telling them this is wrong,” he said.
The FBI and the DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Driscoll was fired without explanation last August. A month later, he and two other ousted FBI officials filed a lawsuit against Patel, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the FBI, the DOJ, and the Executive Office of the President. They alleged that they were terminated over insufficient loyalty to Trump.
In the lawsuit, Driscoll alleged that Patel admitted “his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the president.”
“You take all of these highly experienced people with the perspective gained through that experience, through success and failure alike, and remove them,” Driscoll told CNN. “It’s devastating to the workforce, not just for the morale, but also the stability of the organization and the faith in it from the people inside of it and the people outside of it.”
