"What Would Drizz Do?"

 

Brian Driscoll, the acting director of the F.B.I., has become an improbable symbol of quiet resistance toward the Justice Department’s campaign to single out F.B.I. employees who investigated the Jan. 6 riot.

--NYTimes, Feb. 5, 2025

"Drizz"

He's known familiarly in the Bureau as "Drizz." He's a young 45, without "the typical G-man bearing of his predecessors" -- bushy mustache, a face framed by long curls, and a twinkle in his eye that bespeaks intelligence. But he quickly became an FBI internal hero after his refusal to furnish the names of employees who contributed to J6 investigations and arrests, as top Justice Department officials desired.

Drizz's demeanor has been celebrated at the FBI with artificially generated memes. One video, a compilation of scenes from the movie The Dark Knight Rises, portrays Driscoll as Batman doing battle with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Friends and colleagues describe Mr. Driscoll as unflappable. He was a special agent with the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service in San Diego before joining the F.B.I. in 2007. His first assignment was in the New York office....

In 2011, he passed rigorous tryouts and was selected to the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team, a highly trained unit formed in the years after the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972....

Former members of the rescue team said that Mr. Driscoll was dispatched in 2013 to Alabama, where they successfully rescued a 5-year-old boy who had been taken hostage in a bunker. He was a gunfighter on the blue squadron.

He also took part in a dangerous raid with U.S. commandos in May 2015 in Syria in the hopes of finding clues about Kayla Mueller, a young woman from Phoenix who was kidnapped by the Islamic State. (Ms. Mueller died in captivity.)

During the operation, Delta Force commandos killed a top militant leader and captured his wife. Mr. Driscoll later testified in a criminal trial in Northern Virginia about the evidence he collected at the scene, including a red laptop that the Islamic State had used to force Ms. Mueller to watch jihadist videos.

In 2020, Mr. Driscoll returned to New York, where he supervised terrorism cases in Africa, Western Europe and Canada. He then took over the Hostage Rescue Team in 2022, which handles the most dangerous missions inside the United States, like disabling a nuclear weapon or rescuing a hostage held by a terrorist.

He's a stand-up dude, and he's the type of government employee that might yet save some portion of the Republic from the tyrant.