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What to know about Dan Bongino, the media personality tapped as FBI deputy director
Dan Bongino has been chosen as the FBI's second-in-command, a job that doesn't need Senate confirmation. Here's what to know about the Secret Service agent-turned-conservative media personality.
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Dan Bongino, pictured in 2021, has been chosen for the role as FBI deputy director in the second Trump administration. Calla Kessler/for The Washington Post via Getty Images
toggle captionCalla Kessler/for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesThe Trump administration's pick for FBI deputy director is Dan Bongino, a former U.S. Secret Service agent-turned-conservative commentator whose fiery support of President Trump has earned him a massive following ā and seen him banned from YouTube for promoting misinformation.
Bongino, 50, hosts The Dan Bongino Show, a syndicated radio show and daily podcast that was ranked theĀ 7th most-popularĀ podcast in the U.S. in January, according to industry analyst PodTrac.
Trump said in his announcement that Bongino is "willing and prepared" to give up his show in order to serve.
"Great news for Law Enforcement and American Justice!" Trump wrote on Sunday night. "Dan Bongino, a man of incredible love and passion for our Country, has just been named the next DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FBI, by the man who will be the best ever Director, Kash Patel."
The role of deputy director, which supervises domestic and international operations, has traditionally gone to a career FBI agent. Bongino has never worked for the FBI, though he served in the New York police department.
Bongino defended Patel in an episode of his podcast that aired last week, titled "The Golden Age of Republican Politics." Bongino said he had known Patel for a long time and "I can tell you with certainty that Kash Patel is there for one reason: He's there to 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," he added. "Kash is committed to that and that only."
Patel ā a fierce critic of the FBI with no experience as a senior law enforcement official ā was narrowly confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as FBI director last week, overcoming Democrats' concerns about his loyalty to Trump and fitness to lead an agency that is supposed to be nonpartisan and independent from the White House.
Republicans welcomed his confirmation, arguing he could make changes to the bureau, which some on the right have accused of targeting conservatives in recent years. Patel, seeking to assuage doubts at his January hearing, said if confirmed he would "remain focused on the FBI's core mission."
NPR has reached out to Bongino for more information about his views on the traditional independence of the FBI and to ask whether Patel was involved in his selection.
With no Senate confirmation required, Bongino will soon be Patel's right-hand man. Here's what else to know about him.
He's a veteran of the NYPD and Secret ServiceBongino holds an MBA from Penn State University, and master's and bachelor's degrees from the City University of New York.
An archived campaign website for Bongino's 2012 Maryland Senate bid says he began his career with the New York Police Department in 1995, entering the Cadet program while attending CUNY and becoming a full-time officer two years later.
Bongino joined the U.S. Secret Service in 1999, first investigating federal crimes in the New York Field Office and eventually becoming an instructor at the Secret Service Training Academy in Maryland, according to the archived website.
He joined the Presidential Protection Division in 2006 and served on the details for presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
New Yorker writer Evan Osnos, who profiled Bongino in 2022, told NPR's Fresh Air that year that Bongino was known as a competent, well-liked agent who "never talked about politics."
Osnos said that shortly after resigning from the Secret Service in 2011, when asked about working with Obama, Bongino praised him as a good man and father. In the years that followed, however, he repeatedly criticized the former president and his administration as "corrupt" and "divisive."
"There's been this rapid transformation of him over the course of the years since then, and I think it's caught some of the people he worked with at the Secret Service very much by surprise," Osnos said. "Somebody said in this article that it's like there's two Dan Bonginos: There's the agent, and now there's the politico."
Bongino had political ambitions of his own, as it turned out.
He ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland in 2012, winning the Republican primary but losing in the general election. He also ran unsuccessfully for congressional seats in 2014 and 2016 in Maryland and Florida, after relocating there with his family.
He created his own media empireDan Bongino pictured at Fox News Channel Studios in June 2019. The former Fox host has one of the most popular podcasts in the U.S. Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
toggle captionRoy Rochlin/Getty ImagesAfter his foiled congressional bids, Bongino turned his focus toward the media and started a podcast in his basement. Originally called The Renegade Republican, it touted "downloads in the millions" by September 2016.
"To put it in clear terms, five or six years ago, he was starting a podcast in his basement, and he was putting moving blankets on the wall as a kind of homespun studio," Osnos said in 2022. "And then he had this extraordinarily precipitous rise through the conservative broadcasting ranks, to the point that today, he has a podcast, which at some points has been the No. 1 in the world."
Osnos attributed Bongino's rapid rise to several factors, including his law enforcement background ā which he says gave him a credibility that endeared him to other major conservative broadcasters ā as well as his sensationalistic style and early support of Trump.
"When Trump was in the presidency, Bongino would go on in the morning on Fox and would praise the president for either things he had done or not done, and then Trump would see that and then tweet about Bongino and would often talk about him in the White House, according to sources," Osnos said in the 2022 interview.
Bongino's profile continued to rise throughout Trump's first term, as his podcast grew increasingly successful. He hosted a show on the National Rifle Association's web TV Channel, NRATV, for less than a year in 2018.
"My entire life right now is about owning the libs," he said in one segment, helping popularize the Republican catchphrase.
In 2019, he launched Bongino Report, a pro-Trump news aggregation site in the style of the Drudge Report. That same year, Bongino officially joined Fox News as a contributor.
After the death of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh in 2021, podcast network Cumulus Media tapped Bongino to take over his slot. He also started hosting the Fox show Unfiltered on Saturday nights, a gig he held until parting ways with the network in 2023 over what he described as failed contract negotiations.
Bongino has also published about half a dozen books, some about his time in the Secret Service and others about the first Trump administration, with titles including Exonerated: The Failed Takedown of President Donald Trump by the Swamp and Follow the Money: The Shocking Deep State Connections of the Anti-Trump Cabal.
He's been criticized for spreading misinformationMisinformation experts say Bongino has used his platform to spread conspiracy theories and falsehoods, including about the Mueller investigation, the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump's 2020 election loss.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue cited Bongino as one of the key right-wing figures pushing false claims of voter fraud leading up to the 2020 election. He continued to amplify Trump's lies about the election being stolen, leading the human rights group Avaaz to name him one of the top five "superspreaders of election misinformation" in the weeks that followed.
NPR reported in 2021 that Ashli Babbitt, the Trump supporter who was fatally shot by police while storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, had retweeted Bongino 50 times since the previous February.
Bongino also found himself in hot water over his stance on COVID-19 precautions. In late 2021, he threatened to quit his radio show over Cumulus Media's vaccine mandate ā despite having been vaccinated himself.
Bongino announced on his radio show in October 2020 that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. He told Megyn Kelly in 2024 that he had been in remission for two years.
Bongino was permanently banned from YouTube in 2022 after violating its pandemic misinformation policy by posting a video questioning the effectiveness of masks. Following that decision, Google stopped serving ads on Bongino's website.
Bongino has repeatedly criticized the agency he has now been tapped to help oversee, including calling it the FBI "lost, broken" and "irredeemably corrupt" in a lengthy 2022 monologue on his Fox show in which he cited the FBI's search of Trump's Florida residence ā a court-authorized search related to an investigation into his handling of classified documents ā as the final straw.
"I mean it when I say it: It's way past time to clean this FBI house up," he said. "They have burned every last shred of faith and trust freedom-loving Americans had in it."
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