‘Absolute tool bag’: What new deputy director Dan Bongino has to say about the FBI

He’s called former leaders ‘incompetent’ and ‘potentially corrupt’. Right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino, known for his inflammatory rants against the media, Democrats, and the federal government, is set to join the very entity he has often criticized.

The 50-year-old former New York police officer and US Secret Service agent will soon leave his daily show to take on the role of deputy FBI director under Director Kash Patel, a selection made by President Donald Trump. Despite lacking direct experience at the premier federal law enforcement agency, Bongino has expressed strong opinions on its operations.

His podcast commentary from the past year reveals a loyalty to Patel and a desire for sweeping changes. Those include removing individuals deemed inappropriately political and redirecting investigations away from domestic extremism. In his own words, here is how Bongino views the FBI:.

Even before Trump nominated Patel for FBI director, Bongino was one of his loudest advocates, arguing on his podcast that Patel was the only potential candidate who could "go in there and clean that mess up.". "Kash knows where the bodies are buried," Bongino told his listeners last November. "And he's got shovels, man. He's ready to rock and roll. That's why they're so terrified.".

Like Patel, Bongino says the FBI needs to expose political weaponization within the agency and move agents out of the nation's capital to chase criminals elsewhere in the country. In January, Bongino urged his millions of listeners — whom he refers to as his "Bongino Army" — to call their senators on Patel's behalf.

"We don't get this guy in at the FBI, you're never going to get any answers at all," the podcaster said. In Bongino's words, Patel's predecessor Christopher Wray was "incompetent," "awful" and "potentially corrupt." Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI who was a key figure in the bureau's Trump-Russia investigation, is an "absolute buffoon." And former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Robert Mueller's team during Trump's first term, is an "absolute tool bag.".

The podcaster isn't shy about bashing past FBI leadership, sometimes crudely. He views them as having compromised the agency's morals to unfairly target conservatives. Bongino has also extended some harsh words toward the current FBI ranks. Earlier this month, after Trump's border czar Tom Homan accused the FBI of leaking information about planned immigration raids, Bongino called the supposed leakers "stupid" and said they would be caught and go to jail.

"Do you know how hard it was for me in my last line of work, how hard it was for me to listen to these stupid Obama speeches about big government?" Bongino said of his time as a Secret Service agent under President Barack Obama. "But I always took my job as serious as a freaking stroke. Because I swore to do a job, not to be a politician.".

Bongino said in December the Republican trifecta in the U.S. government is fleeting – and that's one reason why he wants FBI reform to happen quickly, within the next two years. What changes would he like to see? For one, he wants agents fired if they were involved in investigations into Trump.

"If you swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States as an FBI agent and engaged in a tyrannical investigation against Donald Trump with partisan intent and not the Constitution in mind, you do not deserve your job," he said on his podcast earlier this month.

The Justice Department has already demanded a list from the FBI of the thousands of agents who participated in investigations into the January 6 2021 riot at the US Capitol, a move some within the bureau see as a possible precursor to mass firings. Bongino also has argued the FBI has placed too much focus on domestic intelligence-gathering and as a result dropped the ball on serious criminals and overseas threats. He has suggested federal law enforcement wasted time investigating Jan. 6 rioters and anti-abortion activists.

"These are threats to the United States?" he said on a podcast last December. "Grandma is in the gulag for a trespassing charge on January 6.". He has also criticized the Department of Justice and former Attorney General Merrick Garland for directing the FBI to respond to harassment and threats directed toward school boards and educators.

"We are going to make the FBI great again, because if we don't have an FBI breaking up counterterror plots trying to kill us and they're worried about Moms for Liberty and pro-lifers, then we got a problem, folks," Bongino said on his podcast earlier this month, referring to the conservative parental rights group.

Bongino frequently laments how he doesn't feel he can trust the FBI and says the agency has lost its credibility. "Whatever the FBI says these days, I tend to believe the opposite," he said in January after Wray said in an interview that the agency wasn't tracking any specific or credible threats to Trump's inauguration.