Dan Bongino, the FBI’s new second-in-command under President Donald Trump, has a long history of making incendiary claims and comments about liberals, COVID-19, and the need to clean out the FBI.
“The only thing that matters is … power,” the far-right political commentator said on “The Dan Bongino Show.”
Trump this weekend selected Bongino, a former U.S. Secret Service agent and New York City police officer, to be the FBI’s deputy director under new FBI chief Kash Patel. Bongino, who has also hosted a show on Fox News, is one of the most popular podcasters in the United States — “The Dan Bongino Show” was the seventh-most popular podcast in the country in January, according to an analysis by PodTrac.
On his show and on Fox News, he has railed against the FBI and American intelligence agencies after they searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022 and looked for classified documents that Trump held onto after he left the Oval Office.
“The FBI is lost. It’s broken,” Bongino said. “It’s way past time to clean this FBI house up.”
Bongino also has a long track record of proudly clashing with journalists and people on the left — he has argued that “owning the libs is a lifestyle,” and in 2016, as he was running for Congress, he screamed at a Politico journalist who asked him about a report that few of his campaign donations came from the district he sought to represent.
“Go fuck yourself, you piece of shit!” Bongino yelled at the reporter before he hung up the phone.
And Bongino has a track record of attacking health guidance on COVID-19, which led to YouTube banning him from its platform. In one July 2021 segment on his show, Bongino said, “If masks are working, then why don’t masks work?”
