MAGA conspiracy theorist and podcaster Dan Bongino, who was recently announced as deputy director of the FBI, has for years publicly signaled his commitment to rooting out Trump’s perceived political enemies from the bureau.
Bongino’s installment as number two in command at the FBI is the latest example of the Trump Justice Department shirking its independence and quickly transforming into an extension of the White House.
Bongino will be responsible for overseeing day-to-day operations at the FBI, but as a longtime MAGA pundit, the Trump ally has made his extremist views and conspiracy theories about the bureau he’s now overseeing known for some time. He has pushed conspiracy theories about the FBI on his podcast for years — specifically propagating bogus false flag myths about Jan. 6.
On a January 24 episode of his “Dan Bongino Show” hosted on the right-wing Rumble platform, titled “Something Serious is Going on Behind the Scenes,” Bongino elevated a conspiracy theory about the FBI somehow being involved with the pipebombs that were planted outside the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee one day before the January 6 Capitol attack.
“Something really troubling is going on with this January sixth, January fifth bomber case,” he said, claiming, without evidence, that agents within the bureau not only planted the pipe bombs but also covered up doing so.
In a different January episode of his podcast, Bongino called Special Counsel Jack Smith and his report on January 6 “the special tyrant investigating Donald Trump for a fake crime he made up for a fake insurrection.” He then went on to allude to his support for a purge at the DOJ.
“Shame on us if we don’t enter the legal profession and start to pull people out of the DOJ,” Bongino said.
In 2023, he accused the FBI of being, in his words, “no longer a law enforcement entity,” and instead “an oppo research firm for Democrats with an armed political enforcement branch.” He has also previously referred to the FBI as “broken” and “irredeemably corrupt”.
During an August 2022 Fox News monologue, Bongino again called for a purge at the FBI as he railed against the bureau for taking back top secret classified documents that Trump was hoarding at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
“I mean it when I say it,” Bongino said, “It’s way past time to clean these FBI house up. They have burned every last shred of faith and trust freedom-loving Americans had in it.”
Bongino also believes that the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community were behind Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden. According to reporting from the New Yorker, Bongino accused the FBI, in conjunction with the CIA, of trying to “rig” both the 2016 and 2020 elections: “The F.B.I. and the C.I.A., members of it, unquestionably tried to rig both the 2016 and 2020 election,” he claimed in a 2021 episode of his podcast.
Amid rumors that the newly confirmed FBI director Kash Patel may have covertly orchestrated a purge within the FBI as a civilian, Bongino has remained a steadfast supporter of Patel, declaring on a podcast episode this month that Patel will “make the FBI great again.”
“Folks, if we do not have a credible deterrent to spies in this country, counterintelligence to terrorists that are planning, plots here openly, some coordination entity for both transnational and interstate crime, we’re not going to have a country,” Bongino said. “Kash is committed to that and that only.”
“He is there for one reason — to clean this place up,” he said.
