Before ascending to top tier of FBI, Bongino fueled right-wing disbelief
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Feb 26
- 4 min read
By Devlin Barrett
On a recent episode of his wildly popular podcast, the right-wing provocateur Dan Bongino asserted that he would soon be able to show that pipe bombs found near the Capitol the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack were “an inside job” and that “the FBI knows who this person is.”
It is a baseless theory that has spread among the right; the FBI has, in fact, been unable to identify a suspect, despite four years of effort and a $500,000 reward. Nevertheless, Bongino suggested with furious certainty that the incoming FBI director, Kash Patel, would soon reveal the answer.
“We’re in charge now,” he whispered excitedly.
His conspiratorial-minded views, characteristic of his show, offer a remarkably vivid illustration of his likely approach when he takes over the No. 2 job at the FBI. As deputy director, he will effectively serve as the chief operating officer of the premier U.S. law enforcement agency, overseeing the most sensitive cases in the nation. The role will give him access to vast amounts of highly sensitive intelligence, as well as the daily flotsam of rumor, speculation and false accusations that FBI agents receive from informants and the public.
Still, as he talked about his new post Monday, Bongino, a failed political candidate who struck gold as a combative, perpetually online Trump supporter, was emotional as he acknowledged that joining the highest echelons of the bureau would require shifting tack.
“We play different roles in our life and each one requires a different skill set,” he said, insisting that he was “clear-eyed” about the vision that President Donald Trump, Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi have for the FBI. “I am going to do my best to implement that vision.”
Days earlier, Bongino offered a glimpse of that vision, playing a clip of senior White House adviser Stephen Miller declaring, “The existential threat to democracy is the unelected bureaucracy.”
Americans, Miller said, “vote for radical FBI reform and FBI agents say they don’t want to change.” Miller’s point was clear: Trump will succeed in radically changing the FBI.
Bongino has long shouted for such change at the bureau.
He has called for the shutdown of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles terrorism and espionage cases. His skepticism dates to an error-laden application by the FBI in seeking to surveil a former Trump campaign policy adviser in 2016 and 2017 with ties to Russia. He has also called for the firing of all FBI agents involved in a court-approved search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
“What the FBI did to Donald Trump, it wasn’t law enforcement, it was tyranny,” he declared in 2022.
The selection of Bongino, 50, a former New York City police officer and Secret Service agent, represents a sharp break from the FBI’s history given his relative lack of experience at the agency. For more than 100 years, the second-in-command has been a veteran special agent from within the bureau, someone well versed in its inner workings.
Bongino’s rise in the world of conservative news media was fueled by what critics describe as a penchant for spreading misinformation — about the pandemic, the 2020 election and the FBI.
In 2022, he was banned by YouTube for repeatedly violating the platform’s rules about coronavirus misinformation, including for a video that claimed that masks were useless.
Bongino started his podcast in 2015, and worked at Fox News and the National Rifle Association’s now defunct streaming service, but it was not until the 2020 election that he ascended to the upper ranks of right-wing punditry.
That year, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, which led to surgery and chemotherapy.
He quickly became one of the loudest voices casting doubt on Joe Biden’s victory.
When Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, appeared on Bongino’s show in November 2020, he made an outlandish claim, asserting that voting software from Dominion Voting Systems was secretly being misused.
“We’re basically having our votes counted by Venezuelans,” Giuliani declared.
“That’s insane,” Bongino replied. Despite or perhaps because of such baseless claims, Bongino’s popularity soared as his podcasts and online posts were an insistent drumbeat of doubt about the election results.
(Separately, Dominion, subject to a flood of election misinformation, filed a lawsuit against Fox News, accusing it of spreading harmful conspiracies. The network reached a $787.5 million settlement with the company.)
Last week, Bongino raged about a number of topics, offering his listeners advice about how to escape if a would-be killer tried to choke them to death.
He also reprised a pet topic — the FBI investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign conspired with Russia in its efforts to influence the presidential election.
In his shows and in a book he wrote called “Spygate,” Bongino has maintained, like Trump, that the entire investigation was a pretext to harm Trump’s political career.
“I don’t want to move on” from that case, Bongino insisted last week. “I want to find out what happened so it can never happen again.”
On Monday, he assured his audience that he was not quite done offering his thoughts on politics, the government and the culture wars; he plans to keep podcasting this week.
Comments