Trump’s Pick For FBI Deputy Director Is A Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorist
President Donald Trump has tapped yet another conservative media personality and conspiracy theorist for a big job in his administration.
Dan Bongino, a former U.S. Secret Service agent who later hosted a Fox News show and pilots a popular right-wing podcast, will be deputy director of the FBI despite having no leadership experience at the department. His appointment doesn’t require a Senate confirmation.
Bongino, who unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2012, is a major promoter of some of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and COVID-19. He’s also a “significant shareholder” in the right-wing video platform Rumble, the company said.
Here are some of the biggest whoppers he’s spread.
He’s a superspreader of 2020 election lies.
Researchers haveidentified Bongino as one of the most effective spreaders of misinformation around the 2020 election, noting he spent hours of his podcast and posted widely shared videos on social media promoting debunked claims about ballot harvesting and suspicious votes.
“The FBI and the CIA, members of it, unquestionably tried to rig both the 2016 and 2020 election,” he once told his listeners.
Bongino, who has nearly 6 million followers on Facebook, had over 7.7 million interactions on Facebook the week of the 2020 election, The New York Times found at the time.
Last May, he warned his listeners that they should still be leery of Democrats “stealing an election” from Trump. “Do not let them fleece this thing again,” he said on an episode of his podcast.
He hinted that DEI policies and corruption were to blame for the assassination attempts against Trump.
Bongino, who claimed the FBI was “irredeemably corrupt” after its agents raided Mar-a-Lago, raised diversity, equity and inclusion policies as a possible culprit behind the Secret Service’s failure to prevent an assassination attempt on Trump last summer.
“They put out a thousand tweets about all this DEI stuff,” he said of the Secret Service. “Do I know that’s related here? I don’t, I’m just saying, like ― you have one job and only one job.”
After another person was apprehended for plotting an assassination attempt on Trump in September, Bongino asked whether there could be a “mole” among the agents assigned to protect Trump or that one of them could be mishandling information about his whereabouts.
“Is there a honeypot trap going on in the Secret Service?” he asked on an episode of his podcast. “Is there a guy or a woman in the Secret Service having a relationship with someone who is not who they say they are?”
In an August episode of his podcast, Bongino questioned the integrity of the FBI’s investigation into the assassination attempts. “Folks, the FBI is at it again. I don’t trust these people at all,” he wrote on social media alongside a clip from his podcast.
His FBI conspiracy theories don’t end there.
Bongino has also claimed that footage the FBI released of the Jan. 6, 2021, pipe bomb suspect may have been “manipulated” and that something sinister is afoot.
“Something is going on here. Where is the video of him dropping the bomb? Why don’t we have it? Why does it appear manipulated?” he said in a January 2024 episode.
“Ladies and gentlemen, somebody’s hiding something, and it’s not small. They are hiding something freaking huge,” he continued.
He’s also pushed the theory that President Barack Obama’s administration had at least one FBI agent tasked with spying on the 2016 Trump campaign. While discussing the idea on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show at the time, Bongino simply cited “reporting.”
He was kicked off YouTube for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
In 2022, YouTube temporarily suspended Bongino’s account, which had around 900,000 subscribers, for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, he claimed masks were “useless” at preventing the virus’ spread despite research to the contrary ― something YouTube said violated its misinformation policy.
When Bongino tried to circumnavigate the ban by posting from another account, the video platform banned him permanently.
Shortly after, Google pulled all ads from Bongino’s website. He said one of the pieces of content Google cited was about Anthony Fauci, then the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, and said that his “use of masks despite being vaccinated had nothing to do with science.”
He propped up Russia’s baseless claims about a U.S. attack.
In 2022, Bongino suggested Biden’s administration may have been responsible for the explosions that ruptured a set of natural gas pipelines — Nord Stream 1 and 2 — running between Russia and Germany. The act of sabotage, experts largely agreed, was most likely carried out by Russia, which in turn tried to lay blame on the U.S.
Bongino backed up the Kremlin’s claims in an episode of his podcast.
“Is the Biden administration crazy enough to do this to light a spark that might cause World War III?” he asked. “The answer is, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, and I bet neither would you.’”
“The motivations of the Biden administration and the green agenda, I think, are far greater than the motivations of Russia,” he continued.
