FBI director Kash Patel and former deputy director Dan Bongino spent roughly 20 minutes lauding their work at the bureau during Patel’s first appearance on Bongino’s podcast since he left the agency last year. The pair spent most of their conversation gushing over their work and President Donald Trump while railing against antifa and media outlets and defending themselves from internal criticism.
They also appeared to avoid discussing Jeffrey Epstein and growing demands from their own audience to expose the convicted sex offender’s alleged connections to a wider network of powerful pedophiles. Bongino, who reportedly clashed with the Justice Department over the release of materials surrounding Epstein investigations while he was on the job, has spent his return to the airwaves reintroducing himself to an audience that launched him into the president’s orbit.
“I think you and I did a pretty good job, but you know, it really isn’t hard when you focus on the bad guys,” Bongino said in response to Patel’s tenure at the bureau. “It’s not hard to do the job you signed up for if you’re allowed to do the job you signed up for,” Patel replied.
They celebrated a sharp decline in homicide rates and the capture of six of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives, which Patel attributed to Bongino. “You laid the groundwork for it. You worked quietly behind the scenes,” Patel said. “These numbers are truly historic and that was the foundational tectonic shift you and I put into place in the FBI.”
Bongino left the FBI in December after a nine-month stint as the bureau’s second-highest official to return to his former job as a podcast host. On his first show after leaving the bureau, Bongino explained that the FBI did not have a smoking gun in the Epstein files, but “this administration got you the information,” he said.
A scathing report from 24 current FBI agents described the bureau as a “rudderless ship” and “all f****d up” under Patel and Bongino’s leadership. Both men were accused of having an “unfortunate obsession with social media” and being “too often concerned with building their own personal resumes,” with one agent advising the directors to “stop talking, stop posing, and just be professional.”
