Dan Bongino has spent the last decade building a career in right-wing media based on his sycophantic support of President Donald Trump and his willingness to engage in endless conspiracy theories about everything from COVID-19 and the 2020 elections to the FBI, which he has said should no longer exist in its current form.
“The FBI is no longer a law enforcement entity,” Bongino wrote on X in 2023. “It is an oppo research firm for Democrats with an armed political enforcement branch.” He also wrote previously that he wants to “disband the FBI” and boosted conspiracy theories about its role in the Capitol insurrection. “I don’t trust these people at all,” Bongino wrote under a Facebook video about the agency last year.
On Sunday night, Trump announced on Truth Social that Bongino had been appointed as the agency’s deputy director.
Bongino, who previously served as a police officer in New York and as a Secret Service agent protecting former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has no FBI experience—a trait he shares with Kash Patel, the QAnon-promoting Trump loyalist who was last week confirmed as the new director of the FBI.
The deputy director role, which oversees day-to-day operations of the bureau, has typically gone to an experienced FBI agent. According to NBC reporting, the FBI Agents Association recently issued a memo to members stating, in part, “The FBI Deputy Director should continue to be an on-board, active Special Agent—as has been the case for 117 years for many compelling reasons.” Reporter Ken Dilanian posted on X that the message also stated that Patel had “privately agreed” with this.
Neither the FBI Agents Association nor a spokesperson for Patel immediately responded to a request for comment.
Instead, the position has gone to Bongino, a Trump loyalist who has in the past referred to the president as “an apex predator.” A three-time failed congressional candidate, he has risen from the fringes of the online conspiracy community to become one of the most prominent voices in right wing media, leveraging online platforms, as well as appearances on Fox News, to push wild conspiracy theories about the agency he will now help to oversee and about the government generally. (He has written a book called Follow the Money: The Shocking Deep State Connections of the Anti-Trump Cabal.) A claimed proponent of free speech, Bongino is prone to rants and tirades against anyone who criticizes him, and he regularly blocks his critics on social media.
“Dan Bongino is a Trump sycophant whose focus has been delegitimizing any and all legal steps taken against the president and his allies,” Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at media watchdog Media Matters who has tracked Bongino’s career closely, tells WIRED. “Bongino’s appointment hammers home that Trump is building a federal law enforcement team that will carry out his desires to punish his political enemies: You don’t select a bomb-throwing podcaster who has declared that ‘owning the libs’ is his sole focus in life to help run the FBI if you’re aiming for an impartial bureau.”
Bongino served full-time in the NYPD from 1997 to 1999 before joining the Secret Service.
He left in 2011 to pursue a political career, running for Senate as a Republican in Maryland in 2012. At the time, his opinion of his former employer was still very positive.
“The president was a wonderful guy,” Bongino said of Obama in 2011. “From what I saw he was a wonderful father and a wonderful man and he was very, very nice and very kind to me.” In a memoir published in 2013, Bongino added that Obama was “one of a group of men I would have gladly sacrificed my life for.”
Around the same time, though, Bongino began to take his first steps on a path that would ultimately lead him to becoming one of the biggest podcasters in the US.
In 2013 he appeared on Infowars, where he spoke to Alex Jones about the then-recent shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. After Jones said that it’s “so over the top how authoritarian the Democrats have become,” in relation to the response school shootings, Bongino replied that Democrats aren’t crisis managers but are instead “crisis leveraging [and] using a national emotional crisis to get you to believe things that simply aren’t true.”
A decade later Jones would be ordered by a court to liquidate his assets to pay the families of the victims of the shooting $1.5 billion.
Bongino made multiple appearances on Jones show in the run up to his second failed congressional tilt in 2014, this time losing to incumbent Democratic Rep. John Delaney in Maryland’s 6th Congressional district.
During one of his Infowars appearances, Bongino boosted the conspiracy theory that CIA agents were told to stand down during the terrorist attacks on the US Special Mission and Annex in Benghazi, Libya.
Bongino began his own podcast, The Dan Bongino Show, in 2015, and a year later made his third attempt at winning a seat in Congress, this time in Florida’s 19th Congressional District. Just a week before the vote, Bongino was recorded having a full on meltdown while speaking to a reporter from Politico, whom he called “a real disgusting piece of shit.”
In 2018 Bongino was handed his own 30-minute show on the National Rifle Association’s station, NRATV. Bongino used his show to continuously hammer the work being conducted by special counsel—and former FBI director—Robert Mueller, who was at the time investigating Trump and allegations that Russia interfered with the 2016 election.
Bongino pushed the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign was being spied on, a situation he dubbed “spygate” and called “the biggest scandal in American history.”
During one show, discussing the pushback against the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Bongino said, “My entire life right now is about owning the libs. That’s it. The libs…have shown themselves through this Kavanaugh abomination of a process to be … pure unadulterated evil.”
His robust defense of Trump caught the attention of producers at Fox, who booked him hundreds of times during this period, and it appears to be at this point that Trump first took notice of Bongino.
In June 2018, Trump quoted Bongino in two posts on Twitter after Bongino appeared on Fox & Friends slamming then CIA director John Brennan.
Bongino connected with Trump, the Daily Beast reported in October 2018, writing that Trump spoke to his aides about “malicious influences inside the FBI”, citing Bongino as the source of his information.
Bongino’s NRATV show lasted less than a year, and in December 2018 when it was announced his show was ending, Bongino reacted to critics saying he had been fired and poking fun at his demise.
A month later, Fox News signed Bongino as a contributor despite the fact that he had been reportedly barred from the set of Shannon Bream’s show on the station for becoming “unglued” during a recording.
In 2021, Bongino became a Fox News host, with a Saturday night show called Unfiltered, which he used to become one of the loudest voices pushing election denial conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He also used the platform to push the great replacement conspiracy theory and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Bongino regularly railed against what he considered to be government overreach in relation to mask and vaccine mandates.
During the attack on the Capitol, Bongino was temporarily suspended from Twitter for posting a video originally shared by Trump, and in the days after the attack raged about the decision to remove the messaging app Parler, in which he was an investor, from app stores
In 2022, YouTube finally took action against Bongino, who used to post his podcast on the platform, permanently banning him for spreading COVID-19 disinformation. However Facebook continued to allow him to use their platform, where he had built up a massive audience, to promote his conspiracy theories.
Bongino left Fox News in 2023, but has continued to grow his podcast on the alternative video streaming site Rumble, to which Vice President JD Vance has ties and in which he is an investor.
While Bongino has not been as vocal a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory as his boss, he has boosted QAnon figures in the past, and his supporters on pro-Trump and conspiracy channels have been cheering his new role. These supporters claim that he and Patel will finally unmask the “deep state”—a supposed group of government officials they believe have been waging a secret war on Trump.
“Trump has brought together the dream team, the Avengers,” one prominent QAnon promoter wrote. “Get your popcorn ready.”