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His selection is being celebrated by MAGA world, while it feels like the latest scare in Democrats’ nightmare.
President Donald Trump announced Sunday night that Kash Patel had tapped Dan Bongino to be second-in-command at the FBI, after the Senate confirmed Patel as the bureau’s new director last week.
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Bongino, like many new leaders across the Trump Administration including Patel, represents a radical departure from tradition for his role. The FBI deputy director, which does not require Senate confirmation, is typically an active agent with significant operational expertise and experience—something Patel reportedly agreed to maintain before selecting Bongino.
Bongino, a 50-year-old former Secret Service agent turned conservative-media commentator, is instead most well known for his outspoken support for Trump and his frequent spreading of misinformation, including about the FBI.
Here’s what to know about Bongino.
A former police officer and Secret Service agent
Bongino started his career as a cadet then officer with the New York City Police Department from 1995 to 1999, according to a previous campaign website. He joined the Secret Service in 1999 as a special agent, starting in the New York Field Office and assigned with investigating federal crimes such as “protective intelligence, computer crimes, bank fraud, credit card fraud and counterfeiting.” Bongino left the field office in 2002 to become an instructor at the Secret Service Training Academy in Beltsville, Md.
In 2006, Bongino joined the Presidential Protective Division, serving during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bongino then transferred to the Baltimore Field Office in 2010, before leaving in May 2011 to run for office.
He has published multiple books on his time with the agency, including Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away from It All (2013) and The Fight: A Secret Service Agent’s Inside Account of Security Failings and the Political Machine (2016), drawing criticism for allegedly exaggerating his importance and proximity to power and “hijacking the Secret Service brand” to gain attention.
Ran for Congress three times, unsuccessfully
In 2012, Bongino ran for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, winning the Republican primary but ultimately losing by a landslide to Democratic incumbent Ben Cardin. He ran at the time on cutting taxes, growing jobs, and his “heartfelt desire to shake up an unquestionably broken political system and culture.”
In 2014, Bongino ran against Democratic incumbent John Delaney to represent Maryland’s 6th congressional district in the U.S. House, but he narrowly lost.
Bongino then moved to Florida in 2015 for a “non-emergency family situation,” raising speculation that he would run for Congress again, to represent the state’s 18th district. In 2016, he ran instead in the GOP primary for Florida’s 19th district, which was an open solid-red seat, but he finished third.
Survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma
In September 2020, Bongino announced a 7-cm. growth had been found in his neck. The next month, he said he had to undergo an operation to remove the growth, and he later disclosed post-operation that it “looks like lymphoma”—a type of blood cancer. On Oct. 16, Bongino said he’d been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, though he added that “there’s a treatment plan.” In an interview with Megyn Kelly in 2024, Bongino said he was “two years clean in remission.”
‘My entire life right now is about owning the libs’
Bongino began a new career in media after his unsuccessful run for Congress in 2015, starting a podcast in his basement called The Renegade Republican (since renamed The Dan Bongino Show). By 2016—with episodes such as “Debunking Liberal Spin About Democrats and Inner Cities,” “How The Media Fooled America,” “The Truth About Trade Wars” and “I’m Disgusted by Republicans for Hillary”—his audience was reaching millions.
Bongino’s popularity and brash style earned him a contract in 2018 with NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s short-lived online video channel. “My entire life right now is about owning the libs,” Bongino famously said during a segment in October 2018.
Over the years, Trump took notice of Bongino, frequently posting on social media about his comments. “Did you see what Bongino said?” Trump reportedly told a confidant after seeing Bongino as a contributor on Fox News in 2018, according to the Daily Beast. “He’s so right, he’s just so right about it all. You have to see it.”
In 2019, Bongino launched Bongino Report, an aggregator of right-wing media headlines intended as a pro-Trump alternative to Drudge Report.
Bongino’s Facebook page grew to generate “more monthly engagement than the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN combined,” according to a 2020 New York Times report.
In 2021, Bongino was tapped by talk radio and podcast network Cumulus Media to take over the late Rush Limbaugh’s slot. That same year he also began hosting a Fox News weekend program, Unfiltered With Dan Bongino, as well as a five-part series on cancel culture called Canceled in the USA on Fox Nation. (Bongino left the Fox News network in April 2023, citing failed contract negotiations.) Bongino continues to host his podcast and radio show, though Trump said in his post announcing Bongino’s FBI appointment that it is “something he is willing and prepared to give up in order to serve.”
A misinformation ‘superspreader’
Bongino has been criticized for promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories on a range of subjects.
A critic of vaccine mandates and masking (which he called “useless”) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bongino was permanently banned from YouTube in January 2022 for violating its policies against pandemic-related misinformation, and Google pulled its ad services from his website. His podcast also went on hiatus in October 2021 after he publicly threatened to leave Cumulus Media over its vaccine mandate, despite being vaccinated himself. The show went back on air less than two weeks later, however, without Cumulus changing its policy.
Perhaps most famously, in the weeks after Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, Bongino promoted in dozens of social media posts and podcast clips the theory that the election had been stolen from Trump. An analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Politico found that Bongino was among the biggest high-profile right-wing figures to push the false narrative of voter fraud, and the New York Times named him a top “misinformation ‘superspreader.’”
“Ladies and gentlemen, as I said to you, there’s nothing to concede because this race isn’t over,” Bongino addressed listeners in a Nov. 9, 2020, episode titled “Resist” discussing the election results. “We aren’t going anywhere. We need that rally. We need to see the commander-in-chief, still the president of the United States, and this race isn’t over. And even if it is later, it’ll send the message that Trump isn’t going away.” Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old woman who was fatally shot while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, had retweeted Bongino 50 times in the year before she died, according to an analysis by NPR.
Bongino has condemned the violence of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, though he also called on Trump to pardon those arrested and charged with crimes related to the riot.
Bongino has also been criticized for advancing other “conspiracy theories” related to the 2016 and 2024 elections, the Mueller investigation, the Nord Stream pipelines, federal disaster response, and more.
In a post on Facebook in October, Bongino claimed, “I’m batting 1000 with ‘conspiracy theories.’ You can take this one to the bank,” alongside a clip from his show in which he promised that Democrats “are not going to peacefully step aside if they lose in November. There is absolutely zero chance.”
Has called the FBI ‘irredeemably corrupt’
The agency that Bongino will soon lead has long been the subject of a number of his claims and criticisms.
Bongino has baselessly suggested that the FBI played and covered up a role in the pipe bombs placed outside the DNC and RNC headquarters in January 2021, and he’s questioned the integrity of the agency’s investigations into the assassination attempts on Trump in 2024.
In 2021, he accused members of the FBI (as well as the CIA) of “unquestionably” trying to “rig” the 2016 and 2020 elections. “A corrupted intelligence community, in conjunction with a corrupt media, will eat this country like a cancer from the inside out,” Bongino said during a podcast taping, according to the New Yorker. “This is why I’m really hoping Donald Trump runs in 2024,” he said. “He’s the best candidate suited to clean house. Because if we don’t clean house the Republic is gone.”
Bongino repeated the idea that “it’s time to clean house” at the FBI again in 2022, during a monologue on Fox News, in which he claimed that the agency is “irredeemably corrupt” and has been “abusing its power and eroding Americans’ trust for decades now.” In the segment, Bongino outlined how he believed the FBI has a “long history of failures” in its law-enforcement duties while it’s been busy pursuing politically-motivated investigations against Trump.
The monologue came after the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, which Bongino called “inexcusable” and called for the firing of “everyone involved.” (He also called for the abolition of the FISA court as well as reform of the FOIA process.)
In another Fox News segment that same month, Bongino said: “Then you say, well, it’s just a few bad apples. Is it? … But it’s not one bad apple. It’s a rotten orchard.”
