Replies to post #537300 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Bongino has admirers, all the worst of Trump's people, as one of Trump's pets no wonder his eyes look sad.

“Trump has chosen grifters to lead the FBI. Kash Patel sells “K$SH” branded merch, vaccine reversal pills,” Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X. “Dan Bongino’s entire show is telling listeners the world is ending so they buy the dozens of survivalist products he sells. I know this feels like a bad dream. It isn’t.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/191856/maga-celebrates-trump-pick-fbi-deputy-director-bongino

Bongino obviously is ambitiously opportunistic:

Osnos said that shortly after resigning from the Secret Service in 2011, when asked about working with Obama, Bongino praised him as a good man and father. In the years that followed, however, he repeatedly criticized the former president and his administration as "corrupt" and "divisive."

"There's been this rapid transformation of him over the course of the years since then, and I think it's caught some of the people he worked with at the Secret Service very much by surprise," Osnos said. "Somebody said in this article that it's like there's two Dan Bonginos: There's the agent, and now there's the politico."
https://www.kpbs.org/news/politics/2025/02/24/what-to-know-about-dan-bongino-the-media-personality-tapped-as-fbi-deputy-director

After three failed runs at Congress it looks he decided jumping on the Trump bandwagon was the way to go:

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue cited Bongino as one of the key right-wing figures pushing false claims of voter fraud leading up to the 2020 election. He continued to amplify Trump's lies about the election being stolen, leading the human rights group Avaaz to name him one of the top five "superspreaders of election misinformation" in the weeks that followed.

NPR reported in 2021 that Ashli Babbitt, the Trump supporter who was fatally shot by police while storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, had retweeted Bongino 50 times since the previous February.

Bongino also found himself in hot water over his stance on COVID-19 precautions. In late 2021, he threatened to quit his radio show over Cumulus Media's vaccine mandate — despite having been vaccinated himself.

Bongino announced on his radio show in October 2020 that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. He told Megyn Kelly in 2024 that he had been in remission for two years.

Bongino was permanently banned from YouTube in 2022 after violating its pandemic misinformation policy by posting a video questioning the effectiveness of masks. Following that decision, Google stopped serving ads on Bongino's website.

Bongino has repeatedly criticized the agency he has now been tapped to help oversee, including calling it the FBI "lost, broken" and "irredeemably corrupt" in a lengthy 2022 monologue on his Fox show in which he cited the FBI's search of Trump's Florida residence — a court-authorized search related to an investigation into his handling of classified documents — as the final straw.

"I mean it when I say it: It's way past time to clean this FBI house up," he said. "They have burned every last shred of faith and trust freedom-loving Americans had in it."

Copyright 2025 NPR -- https://www.kpbs.org/news/politics/2025/02/24/what-to-know-about-dan-bongino-the-media-personality-tapped-as-fbi-deputy-director