By Adam Goldman NYTimes News Service
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WASHINGTON — In the closing minutes of his podcast, right-wing provocateur Dan Bongino made a promise. Joining the FBI 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 Friday during his last episode. He added, “I’m not going there to be some partisan.”

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His arrival Monday as the FBI’s second in command will test that promise, cementing a major shift at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, where he joins 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 FBI since its founding more than a century ago.

Already, 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 FBI. 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 FBI 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 Bongino, whose experience in law enforcement dates from years ago when he served as a police officer and Secret Service agent, 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. Bongino, by contrast, has never been an FBI agent.

Best known as a high-octane conservative commentator, Bongino began his podcast in 2015, catapulting him to right-wing stardom during the 2020 election. Like Patel and President Donald Trump, Bongino is from the Queens borough of New York City.

Bongino frequently shared his disdain for the FBI on his podcast and radio show while praising Trump. In an emotional farewell episode, he recounted how Trump reached out after Bongino had a cancerous tumor removed in 2020, shortly before the election. “President Trump called in the hospital; he was the president; COVID was going on,” he said, adding that the president asked whether Bongino needed anything. He responded, “I need you to save the country.”

Bongino will replace Robert C. Kissane, who had more than two decades of experience as an agent and had been serving as acting deputy director. Kissane is expected to return to New York.

Hours after Patel was sworn in last month, he signaled his intent to sharply restructure the bureau, ordering the relocation of 1,500 agents and personnel in the Washington region to field offices around the country. Internal documents show that he told several hundred agents on temporary duty to return to their home offices by the end of June, a potentially significant shift in ascending the ranks of the agency. Those temporary assignments to headquarters are critical to getting promoted, providing agents with deep insights into the bureau’s abilities and reach.

But Patel will be hard-pressed to attain his larger goal because of steep relocation costs.

Last week, Patel also altered the hierarchy of the FBI, which could, in effect, insulate top agents in the field from Bongino because they will no longer answer to the deputy director. Some former agents saw that as a positive development.

A series of ousters that was already underway before Patel took office has left a leadership vacuum atop the agency.

James Dennehy, the widely popular veteran agent in charge of the New York field office, was among about a dozen senior executives who have been pushed out. Some were agents with decades of experience who would have offered critical institutional expertise to Patel and Bongino. Now Patel intends to replace some of them with another cadre of senior executives.

On the same day that Dennehy was forced out, Patel circulated a video to his staff saying he had their backs.

Patel also removed the people who knew how to run the seventh floor, where the director and the deputy sit. His new executive secretary previously ran a concierge business. Previous Director Christopher Wray’s executive secretary had worked for years at the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Patel’s unconventional approach has left former agents and analysts to wonder if he is up to the job. In a videoconference with senior agents, he said he would like the FBI to partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the popular mixed martial arts company, and that he was not big on meetings or wearing suits. Patel has also drawn some praise elsewhere. In a moving speech at the State Department on March 6, he pledged to do everything in his power to free American hostages abroad. “This is a top priority,” he said.

He has also defended the FBI, a remarkable shift from his years taking shots at the agency.

Last week, Patel praised the bureau’s arrest of a Customs and Border Protection official in Detroit, describing it as part of the “FBI’s renewed efforts to crack down on public corruption and deliver accountability for the American people.”

But FBI agents had been investigating the case well before Patel became director. Indeed, the criminal complaint shows that agents learned in April 2024 about a potential scheme to defraud the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In years past, Patel has repeatedly denounced the FBI’s scrutiny of Trump.

Yet as director, he set the record straight about one FBI operation that involved the use of a female undercover agent who a whistleblower said had targeted Trump. The right-wing news media seized on the detail, casting it as a so-called honey pot operation.

Patel quickly rebutted the claim on social media: “A female agent was falsely referenced in the media this week as part of an alleged whistleblower disclosure- she was NOT a honeypot.”

One right-wing news outlet called Patel’s pushback “rare and extraordinary.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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