Dan Bongino crawls back to Fox News after failing at the FBI

Right-wing conspiracy theorist and podcaster Dan Bongino has pivoted from his short and rocky tenure as deputy director of the FBI under President Donald Trump and is returning to Fox News. Bongino made an appearance on Monday night’s edition of “Hannity,” after the network announced that he would be a paid contributor to the network.

Bongino, a veteran of the U.S. Secret Service, previously worked as a Fox News host. He was touted as the replacement for Rush Limbaugh after the racist radio host died, but Bongino never achieved Limbaugh’s level of influence in the conservative media. He also ran for Congress three times and failed three times.

Fox News hired Bongino despite his admission in December that he had spread conspiracies and disinformation while he was a pundit. The confession came as he attempted to differentiate his role with the FBI versus someone who pushed false stories about a purported government cover-up of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Fox News has decades of experience promoting and originating fake stories, so Bongino can settle right back in.

When Trump announced his hiring last February, Bongino was one of the more well-known conservative media figures to join the administration. Bongino was infamous for his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, and for that work, Trump rewarded him with a top spot at the FBI.

By May, though, Bongino was publicly complaining that the job was too hard. In an appearance on Fox, he rambled, “People ask me all the time, ‘Do you like it?’ I say, ‘No, I don’t.’ But the president didn’t ask me to do this to like it. Nobody likes going into an organization like that and having to change things and make big bold changes.”

The job was an apparent burden on Bongino even though subsequent reporting revealed that the job requirements were lowered for him. FBI Director Kash Patel allowed him to skip a required polygraph test when he was hired.

When he was working, Bongino returned to his roots in the conspiracy world. He told followers on social media that he would use agency resources to investigate the leak of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to abortion—a leak that angered the right for years.

But after Bongino spent years promising supporters that Trump would reveal the details of the government’s case against accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Bongino ended up in the middle of a massive White House operation to conceal the files. Reports emerged that he was unhappy with the development, and soon after, it was announced that an unusual co-deputy director of the FBI, Andrew Bailey, had been hired.

The clock was ticking on Bongino in the administration, and he left in the new year. Now he’s back among the serial liars and disinformation peddlers at Fox News.

Bongino can add another failure to his resume, but Fox News is happy with him as long as he is yelling loudly at the camera—the truth doesn’t matter.

rss@dailykos.com (Oliver Willis)مصدر