Former FBI co-deputy director Dan Bongino made a fiery return to podcasting Monday, defending the agency's review of the Jeffrey Epstein case, attacking his critics and interviewing President Donald Trump.
"It's been a crazy year," Bongino said of his time as the No. 2 official under FBI Director Kash Patel. Of how the office handled the Epstein files, he called it a “level 10 problem” — one with no good solution.
“It was never going to please everyone,” Bongino said.
Bongino, who officially stepped down last month, said that he'd always planned to stay on the job for a year and that he intends to use his podcast to combat the "grifters" he said were trying to sow division in the MAGA ranks.
"This movement has been hijacked by doomers," he said.
During their interview, Trump suggested that Bongino could be a bigger asset to him with his popular podcast than he was at the FBI.
"I’m very torn," Trump said. "I think maybe, maybe I’d rather have you where you are, because it, you know, very few people can do what you do."
Bongino was a controversial pick for the FBI job, which had traditionally been filled by career agents who manage daily operations across the bureau’s field offices.
Bongino, a well-known pro-Trump podcaster, had been a Secret Service agent, but he had never worked for the FBI, and he had repeatedly criticized it as an arm of the "deep state" on his show.
“The FBI has totally and completely failed America,” Bongino said in a June 2024 episode. “It kills me to have to tell you that you can’t trust these people.”
After the FBI was involved in a search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Bongino told “Fox and Friends,” “The organization needs to be disbanded.”
He also promoted numerous conspiracy theories on his podcast, including some centered on Epstein, the politically connected sex offender who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Even though investigators found Epstein died by suicide, Bongino repeatedly theorized he was killed. In a Jan. 4, 2024, podcast, he played a clip in which a journalist said she was “100%” convinced that Epstein was killed “because he made his whole living blackmailing people.”
"Maybe because I was an investigator before, it’s, like, I’m amazed at how few people are putting 2 and 2 together,” he said then.
Two weeks before Trump named him co-deputy director of the FBI last February, Bongino said about claims that Epstein had tapes he used to blackmail people, “I’m not ever going to let this story go.”
In May, however, he backed off the murder claim and told Fox News that video of Epstein's cell showed that “he’s the only person in there and the only person coming out. You can see it.”
The video was released publicly in July, along with an unsigned joint FBI-Justice Department memo saying that they'd conducted an “exhaustive” review of the evidence in the Epstein case and that no one else would be charged criminally and no further information would be released.
“I wanted to see the files, folks. I said don’t let it go. I meant it. We got elected. We looked at it,” he said on his show Monday. “What we thought was going to be in there wasn’t in there.”
He added that "there were a ton of problems" with releasing more information and that a number of claims that were based on "double or triple hearsay."
"You're seeing that now," he said, referring to a number of dockets that were released Friday as a result of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law that was passed largely in response to the joint memo. He appeared to be referring to a large number of unverified tips included in the release.
Bongino also defended Patel's overhaul of the FBI and urged Trump supporters to have patience.
"Good cases, good police work and personnel changes take time," he said. He didn't identify what cases he was talking about; Trump has complained about the slow pace of action against his perceived political enemies.
"When we got into the FBI, Kash and I, we found there were two FBIs," he said, "a completely weaponized portion of the FBI" that focused on "political targeting first, law enforcement second," and then "the door kickers" who want to take action.
"The problem was finding who was in each group," said Bongino, who also blasted the "leakers" who have "destroyed the place" over the years "and tried to destroy us, too," referring him and Patel.
He also defended his and Patel's much-discussed use of social media at the FBI.
Patel has been criticized for sharing premature information about investigations, including during the manhunt for the person who killed conservative political leader Charlie Kirk. Former FBI officials also told The New York Times in an article published last month that Bongino and Patel had spent time on calls during investigations talking about what they were going to post on X.
"Of course we're going to use it to tell the taxpayer here what's going on," he said.
Bongino interviewed Trump toward the end of the episode.
“I was very unhappy when you left the FBI, but I was very happy that you have your show, which does so good,” Trump said.
