Dan Bongino in 2021. [Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times.]
Right-Wing Commentator Named F.B.I. Deputy Director
In an article today in the New York Times, Adam Goldman and Devlin Barrett report from Washington some startling news for those of us who care about the integrity of our Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The following comments are taken from their repporting.
The choice of Dan Bongino by the confirmed FBI Director, Kash Patel, is a radical departure from the bureau’s history of having a veteran FBI agent serve in the key role that oversees Bureau operations. He is a former New York City police officer and Secret Service agent turned right-wing pundit and podcaster. He is slated to be in the No. 2 post. The President made the announcement on his social media site.
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So why am I (and other police professionals) worried. While we may have our disagreements from time to time with the FBI, we still support their important work in national and international security. He also know the FBI needs to independent of partisan politics and “squeaky clean!”
It has also been reported that Director Patel had privately acknowledged to the FBI Agents union that the next deputy director should come from the ranks. This decision will intensify mistrust among the rank and file of the agency.
Everything I have studied, implemented and practiced about the reform of organizations is contrary to what is going on here. This is a recipe for not only disaster, but one that wish literally destroy the effectiveness of this organization.
This is a stunning turning of events in the world of policing. Again – I urge police leaders throughout the country to push-back, resist, and provide their input to the decision-makers in Washington.
Even without the far-right, conspiracy theorists, who deny elections, and discount what happened on January 6, 2021, this would be a troubling turn of events. More from today’s article:
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“In the past, F.B.I. directors have selected senior agents with extensive experience to essentially run the bureau’s operations, a complex and grueling job that requires working closely with foreign partners and navigating sensitive investigations.
“The choice of Mr. Bongino is a radical and abrupt departure from that practice and raises startling questions about how two people who have never served as F.B.I. agents will oversee the vast surveillance and investigative powers of an agency of 38,000 people and a budget of about $11 billion.
“The combination of Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino will represent the least experienced leadership pair in the bureau’s history [my emphasis]. It is also all but certain to prompt concerns about how the men, who have freely peddled misinformation and embraced partisan politics, will run an agency typically insulated from White House interference.
“’My entire life right now is about owning the libs,’ Mr. Bongino said in 2018. He has also echoed a popular grievance among the far right denouncing the so-called deep state.
“Mr. Bongino’s ascension comes at a time of enormous upheaval at the agency as the Justice Department has pushed out some senior executives who, collectively, have decades of experience running the different divisions of the bureau.
“It is unclear what will happen to the interim leaders, Brian Driscoll and Robert C. Kissane, who served as the acting director and acting deputy director until Mr. Patel’s confirmation. Their initial refusal to accede to the Justice Department’s demand for the names of bureau personnel who investigated the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, made them well liked internally, willing, in the view of many inside the bureau, to stand up to what was perceived as political interference…
“In an interview with The New Yorker, Pete Hegseth, then a fellow Fox News host and now the defense secretary, equated Mr. Bongino to a general who, like him, got ‘to serve in information warfare’…
“The news elicited questions about how the bureau would retain its credibility with two leaders who have a penchant for exaggeration [my emphasis]…
“His tough-talking style catapulted him to stardom on radio and on social media, where he often peddles rampant misinformation. That includes spreading the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen, falsely claiming that masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of the coronavirus, and perpetuating labyrinthine and baseless conspiracy theories involving a plot by Democrats to spy on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign…
““Mr. Bongino ran for elected office three times before gaining popularity as a right-wing commentator.
“A former Fox News host, Mr. Bongino left the network in 2023. Notably, he hosted Mr. Trump on his show in 2021, at a time when the network — and much of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — was trying to turn the page on the Trump era…”
You can read the full article HERE.
If you are a police leader, now is the time to speak out. Be courageous in this frightening time when our Constitution and its values are being attacked.
Improving Police: A Necessary Conversation 
Yes, this is absolutely a radical departure from how things were done at the bureau in the past. Bongino is not known for his professional administrative competency nor is Patel. They have been selected for these roles for very different reasons.
The real question I have is where were you David, and other law enforcement leaders, for the last 4 years? The silence over the blatant political motivations of the Justice department, FBI leadership, the New York AG, and the Fulton County GA prosecutors was legendary.
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Where was I? Really? Let’s talk about how an agency is reformed. And I can tell from a life of experience, the way the White House is doing it is NOT the way to improve any organization. And, I suspect, you don’t think so either! If all you say is true about the Democrats, it seems that today’s suggested cure is worse than the “disease!”Always good to hear from academe…
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It’s always a pleasure to engage with you David, you have a profoundly different viewpoint than I and I firmly believe that viewpoint diversity is where real strength lies, focusing on group and identity based diversity makes us weak and unwise.
The key thing to understand, no matter what our diverse experiences are, is how our elected and appointed officials use their enormous discretion. Wisdom lies in the “wise” use of discretion for street level officers and regional prosecutors all the way up to federal level agents and federal prosecutors. How these officials use their discretion is a function of leadership.
Over the last four years we have seen tremendous abuse of investigative and prosecutorial discretion, time after time after time. From sending more than 80 SWAT level federal agents on a raid at the then former President’s home, the Ill advised civil and criminal prosecutions of Trump and his allies, to the federal indictments against a powerful democrat mayor who dared to offer a different point of view on illegal immigration. All the while ignoring the blatant corruption and illegality of the political left.
This has led to a profound loss of trust in government and our most important institutions. This is much more profound than the extremely infrequent abuses of black people by police that are so exaggerated in the media as to make us think that there is an actual widespread “policing problem.” THERE IS NOT! Except now, at the federal level, only new leadership can turn that around.
Here is how we will be able to tell it’s working, and people are beginning to trust our institutions again. Recruitment levels. No one wanted to join “sick” organizations like the police, military, or the FBI in the past few years. With the dramatic leadership change at DOD recruitment is through the roof. I would be willing to bet my meager university paycheck that the same thing will happen at the FBI and DOJ. Now, will local police chiefs step up and dump all the nonsense and get back to their core mission???
I really try hard to not criticize democrats, but then the Governor here promotes statutory language changes such as “Inseminated Persons” instead of mothers. It’s time to catch the next boat off of fantasy Island before the liberal left loses all of the credibility it has left. We need viewpoint diversity.
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Yes. We do have different “takes” on the world’s problems (and their solutions as well). For me, diversity was always a strength. Let’s say you are 100% correct as to the state of our grand experiment (democracy), what I would challenge is how you go about “fixing/correcting” what is happening now with Musk, Trump, and the Cabinet leaders is not the way in my learned opinion is in any way organizational correct. I have brought change and correction into 2 police agencies and studied academically public administration at the graduate level. This is not administration but the seeding of fear and chaos. What is going on demeans and diminishes thousands of civil servants at the federal level. Human persons are to be listened to and treated with dignity and respect. This is not only a value within all the world’s religions, but also a value within democracy itself. Now who’s right? Who’s wrong? No doubt time will tell. Perhaps in our own way, a good part of what we both believe will prevail — if it be right and true. Peace!
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@solarp2016
Where were you and your fellow officers when Reagan and Bush, Junior were spying on American citizens?
Where were you when you and your fellow officers along with the FBI were when you set out to destroy the various Occupied Wall Street movements because they dare to challenge wealth inequality and corporate influence over the government?
Where were you and your fellow cops along with the FBI when private and public sector white collar crime skyrocketed under Trump? Trump was certainly making money off the government by various means and he did it openly.
Where were you and your fellow cops when price gouging by corporations had occurred during Covid 19 under Trump?
The New York AG had the right and the duty to go after Trump and convict him on 34 felony charges trying to influence the presidential elections.
The Fulton AG had the right and duty to go after Trump for 2020 election interference in the state of Georgia.
What about Judge Cannon’s blatant motivation to dismiss the classified documents that Trump had in his home in Florida? You damn well know that Trump had those documents and he shouldn’t have had them in the first place.
Where were you cops and the FBI when FBI Director Comey had illegally release the Hillary emails which allow Trump to get elected to office?
Where were you and your fellow police officers after Trump had pardoned the J6 insurrectionists, many of whom were cops, ex-cops and ex-military?
Where were you and your fellow cops and the FBI over the blatant political motivation of the DOJ not to send the Sackler family to prison for causing the opioid epidemic that destroying your communities?
Where were you and your fellow cops and the FBI over the blatant political motivation not to go after Colonel North helped to import cocaine into American cities in order to help the Contras?
The silence of police departments from the city to the federal government are legendary when it comes to dealing with crimes being committed by powerful right wingers in this country
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Say no to hate Gunther, it will destroy you.
We can’t escape the need for discretion in our system of justice. Cops and prosecutors make choices about whom to investigate and prosecute because they cannot investigate and prosecute all law violators. The real question of importance is how they make those choices. The first criteria is usually the severity of the criminal behavior, e.g., crimes of violence over accounting violations.
No reasonably minded person can argue that the Trump prosecutions, both criminal and civil, were not politically motivated. You can play the “what about…” game all you want, but the excessive investigative and prosecutorial attention Trump garnered was way over the top and a blatant effort to keep him out of office. The choice to go after him in this way has undermined everyone’s confidence in the fairness of our system, and this leads to chaos and anarchy much like they have seen in Minneapolis in the wake of Floyd’s death. It has also destroyed the credibility of the democratic party.
Restoring a sense of fairness demands that these prosecutors and officials be removed and perhaps prosecuted. A strong signal needs to be sent that the enormous power of the state is never to be used like this, for political advantage, again.
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Allow me to put it this way — that you may be right in all you say about what needs to change. What I challenge is the way it is being done with total disregard of the people being harmed. Patel and Bognino heading up the FBI. Really? You’d support that?
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As an FBI NA grad, I have to say…the jury is still out on what I think. Check back in a year.
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Nope, it is conservatives and cops that need to say no to hate because they are destroying this country along with themselves.
Hate to destroy to destroy you, but I will. When you look at discretion, it is mostly for the corrupt cops, corporations, and wealthy people compare to the rest of the population. Cops and DAs always make choices to not investigate white collar crimes by wealthy people and corporations and corrupt because like the majority of wealthy people and CEOs, the cops, judges, and the DAs are conservatives. They are not interested in helping to make justice an impartial system nor help make society a better one. They need each other financial and political support to maintain their positions in the country.
Trump brought this on himself and you know it. The conservative judges like those at Supreme Court and Aileen Cannon went out of their way to protect Trump and have undermine the credibility of our justice system both at home and aboard. In France, they just convicted a female right wing politician Marine, Le Pen, because they let the judge, police, and DA do their jobs. She is not only facing prison time, but also being ban from running for office for 5 year. In Europe, they don’t let their politicians and business people get away with it because not only do they have laws on the books to stop this kind of thing but they also enforced them. What about Elon Musk not being arrested by openly bribing the people of Wisconsin to vote for a right wing judge. The Republican Party has destroy its own creditability not the Democratic and they are the ones who cause chaos during Covid 19 and are going to cause chaos right now during the next 4 years.
Why don’t you watch the youtube channel Justice Matters by former US federal prosecutor, Glenn Louis Kirschner, and see if he is saying that the prosecution of Trump was politically motivated, and was excessive? After you see Glenn’s videoes, why don’t you write to him and tell him the very same words that you told me and see what his reply will be to you?
The first criteria should be accounting procedures since white collar crimes costs more than street crime. When was the last time, street crimes ever cause an economic recession/depression at home and around the world. The answer is none. It is always cause by white collar crimes by wealthy people and CEOs and you should know that by now since they are the ones that are causing the economic misery because they don’t want to obey the law. The Republican Party
Trump has certainly used the justice system to prevent him from being held accountable by stacking the court system with conservative judges sponsored by the Federalist Society and approved by the Republican Party. He is now using the justice system to go after anyone who dares offers any kind of dissent. He is also deporting people without due process and using the police to kidnap people off the streets like he did in Oregon.
Sorry, but the power of the state has been used overwhelmingly in America against minorities, communists, progressives, liberals, workers, labor unions, socialists, Native Americans, and even against environmental groups/individuals when you look at American political, social, religious, and economic history.
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@solarp2016 What do you think of Patel now?
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/05/report-kash-patel-partying
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