The announced appointment of former Secret Service agent and conservative talk host Dan Bongino to the post of Deputy Director of the FBI has ignited verbal fireworks, with supporters hailing the move and opponents essentially declaring the sky is falling.
Ammoland Editor-in-Chief Fredy Riehl is calling the Bongino appointment “a bold move that solidifies” President Donald Trump’s “commitment to reshaping federal law enforcement.”
At the other end of the spectrum, The Guardian declares in its headline, “‘Unqualified henchmen’: fears rise as Trump names far-right podcaster as FBI deputy director.”
The group Republicans Against Trump declared in a post on “X” that Bongino is “a notorious conspiracy theorist who promoted the lie that the 2020 election was ‘stolen.’”
There does not appear to be a “happy medium” in the conversation.
In recent years, Bongino has been an unabashed Trump supporter on the air. CNN has described him as “a former Secret Service agent turned right-wing podcaster.” The president, however, wrote on Truth Social that Bongino is “a man of incredible love and passion for our Country.”\
NPR, while acknowledging Bongino’s high ranking (7th place) among podcasts in the nation, could not resist mentioning how he has been “banned from YouTube for promoting misinformation.”
The 50-year-old Bongino was an officer with the New York Police Department before joining the Secret Service. According to a biography at Wikipedia, he left the NYPD in 1999 to become a special agent with the Secret Service and was assigned to the Presidential Protection Division during parts of both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, leaving in May 2011 to run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate.
He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in psychology from Queens College and a Master of Business Administration degree from Pennsylvania State University.
According to the Associated Press, “The selection places two staunch Trump allies atop the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency at a time when Democrats have raised alarms that the Republican president could seek to use the FBI to target his adversaries.”
Ironically, it is that sort of agency weaponization which Trump allies day the previous administration unleashed on the president during the past four years, and even earlier in an effort to prevent his election in 2016.
