From his wildly popular podcast to the No. 2 post at the F.B.I., Dan Bongino joins Kash Patel, President Trump’s former election surrogate, to lead the agency at a turning point.
In the closing minutes of his podcast, the right-wing provocateur Dan Bongino made a promise. Joining the F.B.I. as its deputy director, he acknowledged, would require a stark change in approach after years of making his name as a pugilistic pundit.
“I have to stay out of the political space because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the rules,” he said during his last episode on Friday. He added, “I’m not going there to be some partisan.”
His arrival on Monday as the F.B.I.’s second in command will test that promise, cementing a major shift at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, where he will join its director, Kash Patel, in overseeing a bureau of about 38,000 people. It puts two staunch Trump loyalists in charge of an agency long known for its tradition of independence. Collectively, they have the least leadership experience of any pair overseeing the F.B.I. since its founding more than a century ago.
Already, Mr. Patel has raised eyebrows. He has reversed course on a pledge to install a veteran agent as his No. 2 and works out with a personal trainer inside the F.B.I. He has swiftly moved to restructure the bureau, pushing to decentralize the command structure and reassign many at its headquarters. He quickly established a ballooning presence for his F.B.I. director account on social media, shooting down a wobbly theory in the right-wing media, which prompted a slew of stories and some astonishment.
In selecting Mr. Bongino, whose experience in law enforcement dates from years ago when he served as a police officer and Secret Service agent, Mr. Patel is breaking from tradition and relying on someone who has little familiarity with the bureau’s inner workings. Indeed, the past five deputy directors had spent an average of more than 20 years in the bureau. Mr. Bongino, by contrast, has never been an F.B.I. agent.
Best known as a high-octane conservative commentator, Mr. Bongino began his podcast in 2015, catapulting him to right-wing stardom during the 2020 election. Like Mr. Patel and Mr. Trump, Mr. Bongino is from Queens, N.Y.