Dan Bongino to join Patel at FBI as Deputy Director
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
President Trump has tapped Dan Bongino, a hard-charging Trump supporter and one of America’s most popular and prolific conservative commentators, to serve as deputy director of the FBI.
A top podcaster, former Fox News host, New York City Police Department officer, and 12-year veteran of the Secret Service, Bongino is a close friend of FBI Director Kash Patel and will now serve as his right-hand man at the FBI, Trump announced on Truth Social Sunday.
Trump’s choice of Bongino to join Patel at the FBI as its deputy came just three days after the Senate confirmed Patel’s nomination, 49 to 51, with Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine the only two Republicans to vote against him. The appointment is the latest sign that Trump is committed to aggressively cleaning house at the FBI.
Bongino, along with Patel, a former public defender and Justice Department lawyer who became a MAGA firebrand, will report to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Director of the Office of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to uncover threats and safeguard national security.
While Patel has experience as a lawyer and high-ranking official in federal intelligence agencies during Trump’s first term, Bongino has practical law enforcement experience as a former police officer and Secret Service agent. Both have excoriated the FBI over its role in facilitating the investigations Trump has faced since 2017, including submitting faulty foreign intelligence court applications in the Trump-Russia investigation.
In Bongino, Patel will have a deputy who is also devoted to ending the politicization of the FBI and helping thoroughly investigate and provide far more public transparency on the would-be assassins who came close to killing Trump in the final months of the campaign.
On his podcast, Bongino has called the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022 “a freakin’ disgrace” and “some third-world garbage,” and has repeatedly slammed the FBI’s role in investigating the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riots along with the FBI raids and arrests of participants. Bongino and Patel were also at the forefront of Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims.
Bongino detailed the FBI’s doctored surveillance requests and improper spying on a Trump campaign adviser in 2016 in his book, “Spygate,” one of four volumes he wrote on similar themes decrying the “deep state” plotters against Trump. On his podcasts and radio shows, Bongino engages in cultural combat in a bombastic style similar to Trump’s, repeatedly going after top FBI and CIA officials, including former CIA Director John Brennan, for what he characterized as their efforts to sabotage Trump’s first term and rig both the 2016 and 2020 elections against him.
In recent days, Bongino has said he is feeling “on fire” from all the changes the Trump administration is making and in “a celebratory moment that just never ends.”
“Kash is happening – it’s going down,” he said on his podcast Friday. “Reform is happening everywhere. It’s just the Golden Age of Republican politics via MAGA. Thank you, President Trump.”
But Bongino’s exit from the podcast space will leave a big void in the conservative media commentary world.
Bongino’s decision to accept the high-profile FBI post will force him to divest from his conservative media empire and leave his viewers, what he refers to as “Bongino Army,” without a go-to general. The conservative media personality stands to lose tens of millions of dollars by leaving his show even for one year.
The Dan Bongino Show on Rumble is the top conservative podcast in the nation, and in the first month of 2025, it trailed only “NPR News Now” and “Up First” from NPR as the top podcasts in the weekly average downloads category, according to Triton Digital’s podcast rankings. Bongino is also consistently No. 1 in livestreams, according to LiveSearchApp, a search engine that tracks the ratings.
The Bongino Report podcast empire has recently expanded. Last year, Evita Duffy, daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, joined the fold with “The Early Edition,” a podcast that precedes Bongino’s by two hours each day. Just last week, Bongino announced that podcaster Hayley Caronia would join his organization, providing nightly reports.
Bongino’s popularity as a podcaster has been more than a decade in the making after several unsuccessful runs for Congress. He hosted a show on NRATV and another at Fox News before leaving in 2023 over what he has said were differences in vision for his role at the network.
After conservative media giant Rush Limbaugh’s death in 2021, Bongino took over Limbaugh’s old time slot but had competition with some local stations choosing to fill it with other conservative voices, including Clay Travis and Buck Sexton. But Bongino had the literal Trump card. Trump appeared as Bongino’s first guest. Bongino then made big news, asking whether Trump would run in 2024, adding, “We need you.”
Trump was happy to add to the intrigue. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We are going to make you very happy, and we’re going to do what’s right.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a fellow former Fox News host who served in the National Guard, told the New Yorker in 2021, “I carried a rifle in the military, and now I get to serve in information warfare.” Bongino, he added, “is one of our generals.”
In the first few months after Trump’s November victory, speculation swirled that Trump would appoint Bongino as Secret Service director. Bongino, for years, has harshly criticized the Secret Service for gross mismanagement, risk aversion, and lack of technological innovation. He became a leading voice of condemnation about the agency’s failures after the assassination attempt against Trump and the death of retired firefighter Corey Comperatore at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear and nearly killed him.
As supporters vocally backed his candidacy for Secret Service director on social media, Bongino repeatedly said he wasn’t interested in the role after initially playing coy about Trump’s, and his, intentions.
That position went to Sean Curran, leader of Trump’s Secret Service detail during his presidential campaign and a friend of Bongino’s. The two served together in the Secret Service when both were assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the early 2000s.
Bongino has since criticized Trump’s decision to tap Curran for the role even though he said he considers Curran a friend and “a good and decent and kind human being with a ton of character and a lot of dignity, and a patriot who loves this country.” On his podcast in mid-January, Bongino said he was disappointed because he wants to ensure that Trump is protected and believes the Secret Service is “grotesquely unprepared to keep Trump alive.”
Despite the comments, Bongino’s close friendship with Curran could help facilitate some of the Secret Service reforms he’s promoted since the assassination attempts, because the FBI is already performing duplicative roles on many of the agency’s financial crimes investigations.
Bongino, on his podcast, has been a leading voice pushing for the Secret Service to shed its investigative role and focus solely on protecting the president, vice president, their extended families, and cabinet secretaries. The agency needs to “stop wasting over 50% of its manpower on counterfeiting” and financial crimes, he said in mid-January. He also wants the agency to follow Trump’s mandates to jettison DEI hiring and promoting practices, embrace technological advancements, and fix what he called a deep “cultural problem” at the agency that pushes protective details to operate on lean budgets – what he referred to as “do less with more.”
Other top FBI criticism from Trump and Republicans during the Biden administration includes its heavy-handed approach to arresting anti-abortion activists, the surveilling and targeting of Catholic churches, and its monitoring of school board meetings and parents for violent behavior.
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' national political correspondent.
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