In a memo on Sunday evening, the FBI Agents Association told its 14,000 members that new director Kash Patel had assured them that he would follow tradition and name a career special agent with operational expertise as his deputy director.
An hour after the memo was sent, Dan Bongino, a right-wing podcaster who has never been an FBI agent and who has called the agency “irredeemably corrupt,” was named to serve as Patel’s deputy director. That position oversees day-to-day operations and carries enormous power to supervise investigations across the nation.
The unprecedented appointment of two loyalists to President Donald Trump has rattled the FBI community and lawyers who worry that their lack of experience and overt statements supporting retribution for the president’s critics could presage a misuse of the nation’s most prominent investigative agency, according to 14 former FBI employees and prosecutors interviewed by Reuters.
“FBI agents’ oaths to support and defend the Constitution will be tested as never before,” said David Laufman, who worked with FBI agents on sensitive investigations for decades, including as chief of counterintelligence for the Justice Department.
Laufman said the appointments of Patel and Bongino “raise alarming questions about whether the FBI will wholly adhere to the rule of law, or instead will become a political investigative tool of the White House.”
Several recently retired career senior FBI officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, said Bongino’s appointment is especially troublesome.
“The deputy director wields incredible power to open investigations and that’s why this position shouldn’t be held - hasn’t really ever been held - by a political appointee,” a former senior FBI executive said.
Over the FBI’s 117-year history, the deputy director has traditionally been a career role filled by an agent who has risen through the ranks. The No. 2 spot manages daily operations for an agency with more than 37,000 employees, including a dozen senior officials in Washington and leaders at 55 field offices.
Like Patel, Bongino has long raised unfounded conspiracy theories and accused the FBI of being politicized. He has criticized the bureau for investigating the January 6, 2021 rioters and for searching Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022, a court-approved action in which highly classified documents were seized in an unsecured area, including a bathroom.
After the search, Bongino said on his podcast: “Folks, the FBI is lost. It's broken, irredeemably corrupt at this point.” A short while later, he said on Fox News that “every person involved in this has to be fired immediately” and “there is no fixing this, only rebuilding it."
Already in the last few weeks, some evidence has emerged to suggest the Justice Department is pursuing politically-motivated case decisions. Eight prosecutors resigned in Washington and New York, after Bove pressured them to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
In Washington, the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s criminal chief resigned, after she said that she and the FBI were wrongly pressured to order a bank to freeze the assets from a grant awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency during the Biden administration, despite what she said was a lack of evidence any crime was committed.
James Davidson, a former agent who heads the nonpartisan FBI Integrity Project, a nonprofit that advocates for safeguards against the bureau misusing its power, said Bongino’s appointment was especially worrisome because it comes on the heels of Trump replacing the nation's top military officials with loyalists.
"Trump has now positioned himself so that he will control both the military and the FBI," he said. "One can only speculate what that might mean four years from now."
