Over the weekend, he added deputy director of the FBI to his resume, calling it the “mission” and “honor of a lifetime.”
Bongino will hold the No. 2 post in the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency, helping lead an organization previously known for its independence.
New ‘mission’
“I am going to accept the role proudly,” he emotionally told millions of his podcast listeners on Monday.
Bongino’s ascension marks a time of upheaval at the Justice Department, in which senior executives with decades of experience have been pushed out by the Trump administration.
His selection as second in command behind newly installed FBI Director Kash Patel is likely to raise some eyebrows among the rank and file. The FBI Agents Association had pushed for an active-duty agent, which Bongino is not, to be the FBI deputy director.
Patel, 44, and Bongino, 49, represent the least experienced leadership pair in FBI history.
Trump announced he had handpicked Bongino on his social media platform Truth Social.
“He was a member of the New York Police Department (New York’s Finest!), a highly respected Special Agent with the United States Secret Service, and is now one of the most successful Podcasters in the Country, something he is willing and prepared to give up in order to serve,” Trump wrote Sunday night. “Working with our great new United States Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and Director Patel, Fairness, Justice, Law and Order will be brought back to America, and quickly. Congratulations Dan!”
Bongino, who was born and raised in Queens, New York, served on the presidential details for former Presidents Barack Obama, a Democrat, and George W. Bush, a Republican, while he was in the Secret Service.
He graduated from Archbishop Molloy High School, an all-male Catholic high school in Jamaica, Queens, in 1992 before earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Queens College. He got his MBA from Pennsylvania State University.
DAN BONGINO GETS EMOTIONAL FOLLOWING ANNOUNCEMENT HE’LL BECOME FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR
Political misfires
Bongino ran for Maryland’s U.S. Senate seat in 2012 but lost to then-Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat.
In 2014, he ran for Maryland’s 6th Congressional District but lost to Democrat John Delaney by 1.5 percentage points.
Bongino moved to Florida in 2015 and said he would seek the GOP nomination for Florida’s 19th Congressional District. He placed third in the August 2016 primary.
Broadcasting from his basement
After his foiled congressional bids, Bongino found his footing by starting a podcast in his basement.
It was the beginning of his extraordinary rise in conservative media, which led to his multimillion-dollar empire.
“Everybody laughed at us,” he said on his show on Monday. “They’re not laughing now. They did. They actually laughed at us. ‘Oh, a podcast. That’s cute. What happened? You can’t get a real show?’ We went through all of that. We spent our last $10,000 on a microphone and some mixers in the basement of our house in Maryland.”
Originally called the Renegade Republican, Bongino’s podcast had been downloaded “millions” of times by September 2016, he said. In 2019, he joined Fox News as a contributor and quickly became a fan favorite. That year, he also launched the Bongino Report, an aggregator of right-wing media headlines pitched as an alternative to the Drudge Report. His Facebook page grew to generate “more monthly engagement than the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN combined,” according to a 2020 New York Times report.
Bongino would go on to even bigger things in the years to come.
In 2021, he was tapped by talk radio and podcast network Cumulus Media to take over the late Rush Limbaugh’s coveted time slot. It was a move that significantly increased Bongino’s media footprint.
He also began hosting a weekend show on Fox News called Unfiltered and had Trump on as a guest at a time when other Fox News shows were distancing themselves from the president. During a 2021 Fox News segment, he blasted former Fox News host Geraldo Rivera, who described the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks as a riot “unleashed, incited, and inspired” by Trump. Bongino strongly pushed back on the assessment, accusing Rivera of betraying and “backstabbing” Trump.
In 2023, Bongino and Fox News parted ways after they could not agree on a new contract.
His Canceled in the USA program on Fox Nation also ended, and the network’s streaming service no longer airs his daily show.
“It’s not some big conspiracy,” Bongino said on his podcast at the time. “There’s no acrimony. This wasn’t like some WWE brawl that happened. We just couldn’t come to terms on an extension.”
Speaking his mind
Bongino’s brash and unapologetic views on politics and social issues solidified him as a strong conservative voice and helped him create one of the most successful radio shows in the world.
In 2022, he was kicked off YouTube for violating the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. He frequently called masks “face diapers” and has sounded off on vaccine mandates.
Since starting his podcast in his makeshift basement studio, Bongino has gone from barely paying his bills to becoming extremely wealthy. He has published six books that cover his time as a Secret Service agent and Trump’s first administration. He has also become “a significant shareholder” of Rumble, a social media platform, raking in millions. He owns about 6% of the shares in the company.
He has also made a lot of money from touting goods on his podcast.
“What he has created is extremely profitable,” Evan Osnos told NPR in 2021. Osnos profiled Bongino for a piece in the New Yorker. “He makes a lot of money by selling ads on his programs. I mean, if you listen over the course of an afternoon, he’ll sell ads for shotguns, for steaks, for mattresses, for holsters. And in between all of this, he is promoting his political message.”
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It is unclear what Bongino’s new job means for his media holdings.
Bongino told his viewers that the details would be ironed out soon and added that the final episode of the Dan Bongino Show will air on Friday, March 14.
