Dan Bongino’s Appointment Is a Slap in the Face to FBI Officers

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Last week, the FBI Agents Association issued a memo assuring its members that FBI Director Kash Patel had privately acknowledged that the next deputy director of the bureau should be a career agent, someone with deep experience at the FBI. Dahlia Lithwick: Even in this maelstrom of law enforcement horrors, this appointment raises real red flags for me, maybe because of some of the things Bongino has said on his podcast, like that the bureau is “lost and broken” and “irredeemably corrupt.” Or because of what he said on Fox News after the FBI searched for and found classified documents at Mar-a-Lago: “Every person involved in this has to be fired immediately,” and, “there is no fixing this, only rebuilding it.” Can you help us pick through what is mere trolling to see what this all really means? The plan here is to impose “radical reform” at the FBI, and I’m not sure we have begun to understand what that really looks like. Pardoning all the Jan. 6 defendants was bad and if Kash Patel wants to hire them all as FBI agents—these things are legal, they’re constitutional.