Former official says he’d quit 'again' before becoming Trump’s hatchet man

Former FBI acting director Brian Driscoll told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper that he does not regret withholding the names of FBI officials targeted for firing because they were assigned to investigations involving President Donald Trump.

Driscoll was fired in August 2025 by FBI Director Kash Patel, following his resistance to demands to turn over names of agents. Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, charged Driscoll to produce a list of all FBI employees, some 6,000 names, but Driscoll instead submitted identification numbers that did not contain names.

Driscoll told CNN that when he asked Bove why he needed that list of employees, the response he got was that there was “cultural rot in the FBI.”

At that point Driscoll told Coope that he sent a bureau-wide email to all 38,000 FBI employees informing them of Bove’s request for additional names involved in January 6 investigations. Bove accused Driscoll of “insubordination” and sent out an email claiming without fact that “No FBI employee who simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner with respect to January 6 investigations is at risk of termination or other penalties.”

“Well, this is wrong and we're going to speak truth to power and I'm going to speak truth to you,” Driscoll told Cooper. “I'm not the smartest, I'm not the best agent ever in the bureau. I am certainly not the best investigator, the best at anything, and I have been around people better than me in every way, and I learned from all of them, and in those moments, I just need to leverage everything I had and give it back to them and I wouldn't change it. I don't regret it, and I'd do it again.”

But Driscoll, who had only recently been promoted to his new post, called the scenario of political targeting inside the FBI “a nightmare.”

“[You] have the weight of 38,000 people and the world's finest law enforcement organization on your shoulders, and you're watching it be compromised legally,” said Driscoll.

“The FBI was being compromised?” asked Tapper.

“One hundred percent,” Driscoll answered.

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