NEW YORK — The popular right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino has built a career of unleashing sometimes inflammatory rants against the media, Democrats and the federal government.
Now, the 50-year-old former New York police officer and U.S. Secret Service agent will return to the government he has so often criticized as President Donald Trump’s selection for deputy FBI director. He said Monday he’ll soon leave his daily show to take on the new role.
Bongino, who will serve under FBI Director Kash Patel, does not have any experience at the premier federal law enforcement agency. Nonetheless, he has strong opinions about how it should be run.
A sampling of Bongino’s podcast commentary from the past year reveals he’s a loyalist to Patel and wants to see sweeping changes, from clearing the bureau of anyone he views as inappropriately political to redirecting investigations away from domestic extremism.
Here’s a closer look at how Bongino views the FBI, in his own words:
He thinks Patel is the only viable leader
Even before Trump nominated Patel for FBI director, Bongino was one of his loudest advocates, arguing on his podcast that Patel was the only potential candidate who could “go in there and clean that mess up.”
“Kash knows where the bodies are buried,” Bongino told his listeners last November. “And he’s got shovels, man. He’s ready to rock and roll. That’s why they’re so terrified.”
Like Patel, Bongino says the FBI needs to expose political weaponization within the agency and move agents out of the nation’s capital to chase criminals elsewhere in the country.
In January, Bongino urged his millions of listeners — whom he refers to as his “Bongino Army” — to call their senators on Patel’s behalf.
“We don’t get this guy in at the FBI, you’re never going to get any answers at all,” the podcaster said.
He often criticizes FBI employees, past and present
In Bongino’s words, Patel’s predecessor Christopher Wray was “incompetent,” “awful” and “potentially corrupt.” Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI who was a key figure in the bureau’s Trump-Russia investigation, is an “absolute buffoon.” And former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team during Trump’s first term, is an “absolute tool bag.”
The podcaster isn’t shy about bashing past FBI leadership, sometimes crudely. He views them as having compromised the agency’s morals to unfairly target conservatives.
Bongino has also extended some harsh words toward the current FBI ranks. Earlier this month, after Trump’s border czar Tom Homan accused the FBI of leaking information about planned immigration raids, Bongino called the supposed leakers “stupid” and said they would be caught and go to jail.
“Do you know how hard it was for me in my last line of work, how hard it was for me to listen to these stupid Obama speeches about big government?” Bongino said of his time as a Secret Service agent under President Barack Obama. “But I always took my job as serious as a freaking stroke. Because I swore to do a job, not to be a politician.”
He’s ready for sweeping changes — immediately
Bongino said in December the Republican trifecta in the U.S. government is fleeting — and that’s one reason why he wants FBI reform to happen quickly, within the next two years.
What changes would he like to see? For one, he wants agents fired if they were involved in investigations into Trump.
“If you swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States as an FBI agent and engaged in a tyrannical investigation against Donald Trump with partisan intent and not the Constitution in mind, you do not deserve your job,” he said on his podcast earlier this month.
The Justice Department has already demanded a list from the FBI of the thousands of agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, a move some within the bureau see as a possible precursor to mass firings.
Bongino also has argued the FBI has placed too much focus on domestic intelligence-gathering and as a result dropped the ball on serious criminals and overseas threats. He has suggested federal law enforcement wasted time investigating Jan. 6 rioters and anti-abortion activists.
“These are threats to the United States?” he said on a podcast last December. “Grandma is in the gulag for a trespassing charge on January 6th.”
He has also criticized the Department of Justice and former Attorney General Merrick Garland for directing the FBI to respond to harassment and threats directed toward school boards and educators.
“We are going to make the FBI great again, because if we don’t have an FBI breaking up counterterror plots trying to kill us and they’re worried about Moms for Liberty and pro-lifers, then we got a problem, folks,” Bongino said on his podcast earlier this month, referring to the conservative parental rights group.
He may be motivated by a personal connection
Bongino frequently laments how he doesn’t feel he can trust the FBI and says the agency has lost its credibility.
“Whatever the FBI says these days, I tend to believe the opposite,” he said in January after Wray said in an interview that the agency wasn’t tracking any specific or credible threats to Trump’s inauguration.
But the new deputy director’s interest in reforming the FBI may hold more personal significance than some realize. In March, Bongino said an FBI representative used to visit his high school when he was a teenager.
“All I wanted to be was an FBI agent. That is it, man. I, like, adored these guys, man,” he said. “What happened to this agency?”
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Associated Press Artificial Intelligence Product Manager Ernest Kung contributed to this report.
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