Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino returned to his podcast Monday by welcoming President Trump to the show, and castigating the media and online critics who said he and FBI Director Kash Patel did not accomplish what they set out to do at the bureau.
Mr. Trump discussed how much his administration has brought down crime since he returned to the Oval Office. He listed several cities where crime has plummeted, particularly in places where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been well-received by local and state officials.
“So with Memphis, if you remember, we got calls. The mayor wanted us. The governor wanted us — so much easier when they want you. You don’t have to fight them like in Minnesota. But in Memphis, crime is down 75% after about two and a half months,” the president said.
He criticized Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson for fighting the administration’s efforts in the city.
Even so, the president said, crime has been reduced in Chicago by 25% since ICE officers began working there.
“We have an incompetent governor. We have a mayor who’s really a low-IQ person. They don’t want it,” he said.
Mr. Bongino used most of the show to tear into people whom he said tried to sabotage his work at the FBI, calling them “grifters, losers, bums and dips—-s.” Before he did, however, the show’s livestream crashed for several minutes early in the program.
After getting the livestream up and running, Mr. Bongino trashed the media who condemn Mr. Trump’s policy decisions, saying they are ignorant and not dialed into the same information that the president has exclusive access to daily.
“They’re not read in on these programs … how he’s making decisions on Greenland and the ’Donroe’ doctrine based on a president’s daily brief he gets every day. These media people have no idea,” he said. “They don’t even know what the freaking [security] threats are like. ’Oh, that’s a crazy decision.’ How do you know?”
“You don’t know s—-. You don’t know anything. Just be honest that you don’t know. You can have an opinion on it. I’m not telling you media people not to have an opinion. Have an opinion. Great, it’s a constitutional republic, but just be honest that you don’t know s***, and he does,” he said.
Returning from his high-level post at the FBI, Mr. Bongino said there were things that “even now, obviously, I’m not going to be able to talk about,” citing “ongoing cases and other things.”
“You guys didn’t pay me … to go in there and come out here and try to be some like, [a] superhero. You paid me to do the right thing, and the right thing involves keeping custody over information,” he said.
He said during his 10-month tenure at the bureau, the FBI “crushed the crime rate in largely liberal cities,” so he did not care what liberal media outlets think of him.
“So liberals and their media pals, you can get your lips and just pucker them up and plant a big wet one on my a—, because you, you guys, would just rather see people dead,” he said.
Mr. Bongino said he, the “pod father,” is back on the microphone to “take back this movement.”
“This movement’s been hijacked by a small group of dips—-s, and bums and losers who are nothing but doomers under the frame of accountability,” he said.
He slammed unnamed FBI whistleblowers as being untrustworthy and in collusion with the media.
Mr. Bongino, an ex-Secret Service agent and former NYPD officer, started actively positioning himself to leave the FBI in July, according to people familiar with the situation.
He began looking for an exit, they said, after a public blowup with Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of the Justice Department’s Epstein files.
“He actually went through the process of cleaning some of his office out. He wasn’t going to work,” a source said. “He didn’t want to be there. And then he started pushing the Jan. 6 pipe bomber case.”
The talk of his exit became more intense when Mr. Trump appointed former Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as the FBI’s co-deputy director in August. Mr. Bailey would only need to be on the job for 90 days from his appointment to qualify to be acting deputy director or acting director.
In early December, a report from an alliance of active-duty and retired FBI personnel described the bureau as “rudderless,” to which Mr. Bongino lashed out at the New York Post for reporting the internal 115-page report as “attacking our reform agenda with gossipy anecdotes from disgruntled former employees.”
