If you’ve ever wondered just how deep the dysfunction runs inside the FBI, Dan Bongino just gave a peek behind the curtain—and it’s worse than you think.
In a revealing conversation on the “Hang Out with Sean Hannity” podcast released Tuesday, Bongino described a bureau split into what he bluntly called “two FBIs.” One side, he said, is filled with agents doing the hard, honorable work Americans expect. The other? A nest of internal saboteurs leaking to the press and undermining the mission from within.
“There were two FBIs trying to help you solve the A, B and C problems, and that’s FBI one and FBI two,” Bongino said.
Bongino, who served as deputy director from March 2025 to January of this year, didn’t hold back in describing the divide. He praised agents working violent crime and child exploitation cases, saying he felt “honored” to serve alongside them. These are the people actually protecting Americans. The ones doing the job the FBI was created to do.
But then there’s what he called “this other FBI,” which he said was “populated with, to say, unfortunately, ‘snakes’ is being nice.”
And here’s where it gets even more troubling. Bongino said he and FBI Director Kash Patel couldn’t easily tell who was who. Loyalty wasn’t obvious.
“You’re trying to figure this out, and you’re asking someone for advice, you’ve only been there a couple weeks, and you don’t know if that person is part of the good FBI or the bad FBI,” Bongino explained.
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Think about that. Senior leadership inside the FBI, tasked with restoring integrity, couldn’t even rely on internal guidance without wondering if they were being set up.
It gets worse.
Bongino said he was repeatedly assured certain individuals were trustworthy, only to suspect them of leaking shortly afterward.
“It happened a couple times where they’d say, ‘Oh, you can trust John Smith.’ And you trust John Smith, and then a week later you see a leak in the media and you’d be like, ‘I’m pretty sure that came from John Smith,’” he said.
At that point, most bureaucrats would shrug and complain. Bongino did something smarter.
He set a trap.
To flush out leakers, Bongino began planting harmless, fake details—like an “innocuous” schedule item—and sharing them selectively with specific individuals. Then he watched. If that exact detail showed up in the press, he had his answer.
“It was like we would play this little game,” he said.
Call it a game if you want. It was actually a classic counterintelligence tactic, and it worked. When the planted information surfaced publicly, Bongino confronted the source directly. No guesswork. No plausible deniability. Done.
When you think about it, what Bongino describes isn’t just bureaucratic infighting, it’s a battle over what the FBI even is. Is it a law enforcement agency serving the public, or a politicized institution where leaks and agendas shape outcomes behind the scenes? Apparently, there are enough of the latter to be a serious problem.
And if rooting out “snakes” requires undercover tricks from the deputy director himself, that tells you everything you need to know about how entrenched the problem has become.
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