In 2018, Dan Bongino, then a right-wing podcaster who had dedicated his professional life to owning the libs, shared with his audience his latest triumph. Bongino had recently participated in a panel discussion about the “deep state,” one of his areas of expertise. The panel, Bongino explained, had turned out to be a setup. The moderator, the military historian Vince Houghton, was a closet lib, “some complete zero,” who, unable to keep up with Bongino’s formidable intellect, resorted to sputtering profanity.
But Bongino flipped the script. “I get up; I rip the microphone off; I storm off the stage; I’m like, ‘Screw this guy,’” he explained. “But here’s the funny thing, folks. The whole crowd at the panel—there had to be 200-plus people—storms out of the room with me!”
Bongino’s inspiring tale of persecution turned triumph, like other narratives he has repeated, bears some surface relation to the facts. But Bongino omitted certain key events. One was the moderator’s response to Bongino’s put-down, which a reporter recorded at the time: “You’re an idiot, you’re a moron, and you’re deranged!” Another is that, contrary to Bongino’s claim that the entire crowd stormed out with him, only half did so. The other half stayed and cheered his departure. The third is what Bongino did right before storming off, according to two people present: He chucked a bottle of water at the moderator’s head. Not exactly the picture of a man who has just overawed his opponents with the force of sheer reason.
Like many confident but unreliable narrators of the MAGA movement, Bongino has since moved on to bigger and better things. Last month, Donald Trump appointed him to serve as deputy director of the FBI. (A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment about the panel episode.) Even to those benumbed by the second Trump administration, this came as something of a shock. The bureau’s new director, Kash Patel—whose primary job qualification, like Bongino’s, is fanatical loyalty to Trump—initially placated concerned staff by promising to elevate career FBI officials as his deputies. But after the rank and file resisted demands by the Justice Department to turn over names of agents who had investigated the January 6 insurrection, the president decided that the FBI needed more political discipline, according to CNN, and compounded the effect of Patel’s appointment with the addition of Bongino.
In an email to FBI staff, Patel wrote that he felt “confident Dan will bring his vigor and enthusiasm to the Deputy Director role, driving the operations of this organization in the right direction.” This is, strictly speaking, correct, depending on how one defines right.
Bongino rose to fame as a former Secret Service agent who quit in disgust in 2011. (Given the agency’s shaky performance during the most recent presidential campaign, he may have been onto something.) He ran for Senate in Maryland the next year, lost massively, then ran for a House seat in Maryland two years later, lost narrowly, and then moved to Florida to run for the House yet again, finishing a distant third in the Republican primary. At that point, perhaps wisely, he transitioned from electoral politics to a successful career as a right-wing media personality and podcaster.
Bongino has written or co-written eight books, which is less impressive than it sounds, because he tends to regurgitate the same ideas over and over. Three of Bongino’s books cover the Secret Service, and another three cover the Trump-Russia scandal. To get a sense of how his mind works, I decided to read several of them, but after a few pages, taking mercy upon myself, I lowered the target to one.
Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump is the first volume in Bongino’s trilogy about the Trump-Russia scandal. Or, as Bongino would put it, the Clinton-Russia scandal. Bongino’s argument, familiar to anybody who follows right-wing media, is that the mistaken belief that Russia cooperated with the Trump campaign is the product of a vast conspiracy involving the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and the FBI. Like a defense lawyer, he walks through the evidence selectively, presenting parts of it in the most sympathetic possible light (for example, when Russians proposed to help the campaign in 2016, Donald Trump Jr. had no choice but to listen) while ignoring facts he can’t spin. Bongino disputes not only that the Russians carried out the hack of Democratic emails in 2016, despite U.S. intelligence determining that they did, but also that Russia favored Trump at all—a preference that Russian propaganda was broadcasting openly.
Bongino argues that Vladimir Putin would never support Trump, “a successful capitalist committed to spreading economic freedom throughout the world.” Instead, he argues, Russia likely preferred Clinton because “her leftist ideology mirrors her mentor’s, Saul Alinksy, the radical Marxist organizer who believed, just as Putin does, that ‘conflict is the route to power.’” The entire explanation hinges on a tenuous three-way ideological link, which in turn rests on a failure to absorb the demise of the U.S.S.R.
Like other Trump defenders, Bongino fails to explain the central flaw in the theory that the Trump-Russia scandal was manufactured to tip the 2016 election: If the FBI’s probe was intended to hurt the Trump campaign, why did it publicly deny his links to Russia until after the election?
In Spygate, Bongino wrote that the FBI was guilty of “false accusations, illegal spying, and entrapment”; taken together, this was “the greatest scandal in American political history.” Or, at least, it used to be. In January, Bongino suggested that the FBI was covering up the identity of whoever planted pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees on the eve of January 6, 2021. “Folks, this guy was an insider,” he said on his podcast. “This was an inside job. And it is the biggest scandal in FBI history.” Presumably, this would demote the previous greatest scandal in American political history, which also heavily involved the FBI, to the second spot. With Bongino now poised to operationalize his theories from a position of power, one suspects that more scandals are due to follow.
