Brian Driscoll says Kash Patel put his politics under a microscope last year when he was offered the FBI’s deputy director job, asking him who he voted for in 2024 and when he had become a supporter of President Donald Trump.
Driscoll said Patel told him the vetting process would go smoothly if he stayed off social media, made no donations to the Democratic Party and did not vote for Kamala Harris. The exchange, he said in an interview with Anderson Cooper, made “the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”
That account lands in a bureau already shaken by questions about loyalty, personnel and the reach of political pressure. Driscoll briefly served as acting FBI director for just a month before stepping down when Patel was confirmed by the Senate in February 2025, and he later said Patel told him that “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.”
Driscoll said that was the first time Patel had put the point to him so bluntly. He said the message was reinforced by an order he received from Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, to hand over the names of every employee involved in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 rioters and to fire eight senior officials. When Driscoll asked why the names were needed, he said he was told there was cultural rot in the FBI.
He refused. “I was telling them this is wrong,” Driscoll said. He was fired without explanation last August.
A month later, Driscoll 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. The suit said they were terminated over insufficient loyalty to Trump. Driscoll alleged in the case that Patel admitted “his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the president.”
The larger consequence reaches beyond one personnel fight. Driscoll said removing highly experienced people is devastating to the workforce, the stability of the organization and the faith in it from people inside and outside it. Patel now leads the FBI, while Bove has since become a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, leaving the bureau’s internal ruptures to be argued in court and tested in the rank and file.
