More Heads Roll At Fbi

The Trump administration has launched another purge at the FBI, forcing out three law enforcement veterans including a former head of the agency, according to two people familiar with the developments.

Former acting director Brian Driscoll, Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington Field Office Steven Jensen, and Washington-based Special Agent Walter Giardina were informed they are being fired, according to the two people, who were not authorized to discuss the matter. Formal paperwork is expected to be issued Friday.

It’s the latest round of housecleaning at the FBI, which has seen convulsive turmoil in President Donald Trump’s second term. The firings were reported earlier by the New York Times.

Many of those purged have been targeted due to their roles in the FBI’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The vast probe involved agents, analysts and technical experts across the country.

After Trump returned to office in January, some officials who worked on or supervised aspects of the Jan. 6 probe were allowed to stay in their posts or even promoted, but pressure from MAGA activists eventually led to many of those agents being dismissed.

That appeared to be the case with Jensen, who was installed by Director Kash Patel as head of the FBI’s critical Washington Field Office just four months ago.

Trump allies quickly seized on Jensen’s selection for the powerful post, decrying him as a key driver of the FBI's aggressive approach to investigations and arrests of alleged perpetrators of the Capitol riot. The decision by Patel to retain and, in fact, promote him to lead the bureau's Washington field office prompted an early moment of discord between Trump's MAGA allies and the new administration.

Jensen had been expected to attend a press conference Thursday with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington. But Jensen did not show up. Pirro was flanked instead by FBI official Reid Davis, the special-agent-in-charge in Washington for criminal matters.

Asked why Jensen was absent, Pirro replied: “I'm not going to talk about politics today.”

An FBI spokesperson also declined to comment.

Driscoll was tapped by Trump to serve as the FBI’s acting director in January, although confusion surrounded that appointment from the beginning, with some officials saying Driscoll was supposed to have been appointed as the acting No. 2 official at the bureau.

Driscoll soon found himself in hot water with top Justice Department officials for resisting their demand for a list of all FBI personnel who worked on Jan. 6-related investigations. Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, indicated that Driscoll and others had engaged in “insubordination”by refusing to share the roster with their superiors at DOJ.

Giardina worked on aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. He was also involved in the arrest of Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro for refusing to testify before the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot. Navarro’s lawyers and a federal judge called the arrest unnecessary and questioned why he was not simply allowed to turn himself in. Navarro himself branded Giardina and the other agent involved in the arrest as “kind Nazis.”

Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, called the new round of firings disturbing and urged fellow lawmakers to take action.

“The continued purging of experienced, non-partisan FBI agents by the Trump administration is nothing short of alarming,” Warner said, calling the dismissals “part of a disturbing pattern of retaliation and politicization at an institution charged with safeguarding national security and the rule of law.”

The FBI Agents Association issued a statement saying it is “deeply concerned” about agents being “summarily fired without due process for doing their jobs investigating potential federal crimes.”

“Agents are not given the option to pick and choose their cases, and these Agents carried out their assignments with professionalism and integrity. Most importantly, they followed the law,” the group’s statement said. “If these Agents are fired without due process, it makes the American people less safe.”

The latest firings come less than three weeks after U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb tossed a legal bid by anonymous FBI officials to bar their superiors from targeting them for exposure or dismissal over their roles in the Jan. 6 investigation.

Though Cobb noted that the lawsuit was filed in a “whirlwind of chaos and fear,” she said the claim that the administration was going to retaliate against those involved in the Jan. 6 cases was “too speculative.” And she noted that an ongoing review of FBI officials for “loyalty” to the administration was not part of the original lawsuit and therefore could not be tacked on at the last minute. Cobb left open the possibility that the officials could submit a revised lawsuit and revive the litigation.

Jacob Wendler contributed to this report.