Michael Isikoff writes:

Just days before the U.S. launched the war in Iran last February, FBI director Kash Patel fired five veteran agents who specialized in countering Iranian threats to the U.S. homeland — a move that the bureau’s former acting director Thursday called an “abomination” that has had a crippling impact on U.S. national security.

“It’s absolutely devastating,” Brian Driscoll, a highly regarded senior agent who last year served briefly as the FBI’s acting director, said about the dismissals in an interview for the SpyTalk podcast.

“Those men and women had a deep level of knowledge, skills, abilities, [and] experience…on the Iranian threat. The fact that they were fired at all is disgusting,” he said.

Driscoll’s comments to SpyTalk were some of his harshest yet about the bureau’s leadership since he himself was fired by Patel last year, a move that he and two other senior colleagues are challenging in an ongoing lawsuit against the FBI for wrongful termination.

His remarks came shortly after another lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Washington on Thursday which surfaced new details about the Trump administration’s efforts to politicize the agency by purging the workforce of anybody tied to investigations of the president.

That wrongful termination complaint, which names Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche as defendants, was filed by nine former FBI agents who were assigned to work on the investigation overseen by special counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s refusal to return classified documents he had taken with them to his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida. The agents were abruptly fired last February with no cause given even though, according to the suit, Patel had in the months before privately praised some of the dismissed agents for their work.

While the firings were publicly known, the lawsuit revealed for the first time the agents’ backgrounds, including that five of them had deep, years-long experience in investigating Iranian-linked plots—and that they were cashiered just as the threat from the Islamic Republic was spiking to levels unseen in years.

“These are people who have forgotten more than I’ll ever know about [Iranian] threats,” Driscoll said about their dismissals. “And now they’re on the street.”

Among them was Jeremy Linton, a former U.S. Navy officer who spent nearly a decade in the FBI and, as a counterintelligence agent in the Washington field office, had drafted the affidavit that led to the Mar-a-Lago search.

At the time of his firing on Feb. 25, 2026, Liinton was overseeing “several dozen counterintelligence investigations relating to threats from Iran,” according to the complaint. His dismissal left those cases in disarray given that Linton was, with no advance notice, evicted from his FBI office in northern Virginia three days before the Iran War began, the lawsuit alleges. “Linton was unable to transition his cases and impending operations to other agents or convey intelligence he had received relating to Iran,” the suit states. [Continue reading…]