Over the years, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino said the Biden administration and corrupt "deep state" actors "weapons" were "weapons" to Donald Trump.
They accused the agency of covering up knowledge of the pipeline bombs placed before the January 6 attack. They suggested that FBI agents helped spark the riots at the Capitol. They said FBI agents committed crimes and tried to "overthrow" Trump.
When Patel and Bongino did this, they not only said they did not agree with the FBI's investigation or prosecution decision. They accuse people of federal crimes. It is illegal to investigate and prosecute someone because you don’t like their political beliefs, and that’s what they say. And there is no evidence to support this.
Since the two led the FBI, Director Patel and Deputy Director Bongino were in an awkward situation. A large number of Trump supporters still believe in all these things, and some openly ask: Why didn’t Bongino and Patel reveal the “truth” of their promises? Why doesn’t the Trump administration arrest and prosecute Patel’s labeled “government gangster”?
Since they took office, the two have obviously tried to take a careful route. They are browsing (or stop talking about) some of their debunked claims while promising to release documents, they say they will invent new revelations to others, including their claims on FBI wrongdoing in Russia and in the Jan. 6 investigation.
Their approach alienated a group of magazine voters.
"Soup Salad from Kash and Dan," Maga Podcaster Joe Oltmann said on X on Monday, referring to the interview the couple aired on Fox Business over the weekend. “WTH is happening, why does Comey feel the same way in the position?”
What Patel and Bongino are meeting is the difference between playing partisan conspiracy theorists and law enforcement agencies with 38,000 employees, current FBI officials said.
The FBI declined to comment.
“Once they arrive at the FBI, I believe they find it is not full of hope to undermine the deep state operators of our democracy,” said Christopher O'Leary, a former senior special agent of the FBI. "Quote the opposite - the FBI ranking is full of dedicated agents and intelligence professionals dedicated to the rule of law and the protection of the Constitution. Unfortunately, this is inconsistent with many of their conspiracies and false information, as they lasted forever in their previous lives."
Maria Bartiromo showed awkwardness in a Fox Business interview, who, along with Patel and Bongino for years, said the FBI had been weaponized.
For example, Bartiromo Baked Patel’s reasons for why former FBI officials oversee investigations into Trump’s campaign against Russia have not been prosecuted for his alleged misconduct.
"Comey, director, with the respect we deserved, we've been talking about it for a long time, and I've been asking for responsibility for years," Bartiromo said. "Comey, Strzok and the rest, they have TV shows, they have media platforms. They're good. There's no accountability."
She refers to former FBI director James Comey and former FBI agent Peter Strzok, whom Trump fired in 2017, after the text showed his profound political and personal attitude towards Trump. The two played roles in the Russian investigation.
Patel replied that the regulations were over. “Well, look, it’s a fair criticism, but I’m going to tell people that we’ve not been in the FBI for the past five years, when we were still in a situation where we could investigate criminal behavior.
"What we can do now is continue to publish documents and information that these people have retained from the American public," he added. "He and I just discovered more last week and we will continue to work with Congress to get these documents out."
In fact, John Durham, the first special attorney appointed by the Trump administration, spent three years investigating the crime demands of Comey, Strzok and other FBI officials, but never accused them of crime. Durham sued an FBI attorney on the list who admitted to changing emails in a surveillance warrant application. Two other people accused of lying to the FBI were acquitted at trial.
The promise to release FBI documents appears to be part of Patel and Bongino's strategy to appease magazine conspiracy theorists while overseeing thousands of FBI agents who believe the conspiracy theory is false and destructive.
Patel said in a Fox Business interview that his FBI predecessor “detained and hid the file and placed it in a room that people shouldn’t be looking at, which is a good thing we’re cleaning it up here now and you’ll see a wave of transparency. Just give us a week or two or two.”
Patel also promised to release a series of documents related to the FBI's January 6 investigation. Both Bongino and Patel suggest they think the FBI has played a role in encouraging the thugs.
Patel was an early supporter of the “Feder” conspiracy theory, which undercover FBI agents incited Capitol riots to smear magazine campaigns. "When will the FBI put those guys in?" Patel asked on the 2022 online show "Kash's Corner." “Does those confidential human resources come into contact with people who don’t commit crimes and convince them to do so?”
But now Bongino seems to be taking a more nuanced point of view. "We dug far away to find it, and I'm sure now we have a conclusive, definitive answer."
However, he added, he wanted to make sure the public understood: "There is a difference between an agent and an asset. I just hope that when people put that information there, they will make the difference."
He appears to refer to a detailed report by the Department of Justice Inspector General released in December that concluded that FBI undercover employees were not in the riot on January 6. The report found that Washington had 26 "confidential human resources" as part of the protests, but no one was authorized to enter the Capitol. The report found that four did so.
Bongino's emphasis on the differences between "agents" and "assets" shows that the information released by the FBI is consistent with the Inspector General's findings.
Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi also promised to release more new documents on shameful financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The existence of Epstein’s client list will expose democratic politicians in pro-Trump circles. But officials close to the investigation said there was no such list of clients.
Patel and Bondi have not said it, but they have promised new documents to provide new details.
Some people in the magazine world become uneasy. "Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are protecting the identity of pedophiles," Trump supporter Evan Kilgore said on X.
In a Fox Business interview, Patel and Bongino explicitly asserted that the evidence they saw showed that Epstein did commit suicide in jail in 2019 despite widespread suspicion about this official story.
"You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide," Bartyromo said. “People don’t believe it.”
"They have the right to speak out. But as someone who has been a public defender, as a prosecutor, someone who has been in the prison system, someone who has been in metropolitan detention centers, he has been in quarantine housing, and when you see a person, you know suicide, and that's that."
"I've seen the entire document. He committed suicide," Bongino added.
The response from magazine supporters was to refer to Bongino as a truth society that called the “deep state traitor.”
Patel and Bongino have never fully embraced the conspiracy theory of Epstein's murder, but the two, especially Bongino, adopted the same eccentric idea that law enforcement officials said: the idea that the FBI secretly knew who had planted a pipe bomb in Washington hours before the January 6 attack.
In January, the FBI released what it said was a new video of growing bombs outside Washington State Republicans and Democratic headquarters. But FBI officials said they did not identify the suspect, or even determine whether the character was a man or a woman.
A few weeks after he was appointed deputy director of the FBI, Bongino accused the FBI of lying to air the podcast. "I believe the FBI knew about the identity of this pipeline bomber four years ago on January 6, just don't want to tell us because it's an internal work," he said.
"I firmly believe that the people who planted the pipe bomb on the DNC on January 6 were to create false assassination attempts because they needed to stop Republicans from questioning in front of national television viewers in the 2020 election," Bongino said in an interview with conspiracy theorist and political commentator Julie Kelly.
Patel also advocates this view, saying in January, the tube bomb could be a "government trick" grown by "rogue FBI sources."
The current FBI official said there is no evidence to support any allegations.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson last week, Tucker Carlson, former acting U.S. attorney in Washington, accusing Bongino of ordering the replacement of FBI personnel investigating the pipeline bomb case.
In a Fox Business interview, Bongino said the public needed the FBI to be “involved in a pipeline bomb case.” He did not repeat his claim that the FBI knew who planted the bomb.