Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, appeared to become emotional on live national television Thursday. Not while recalling some gut-wrenching FBI child exploitation case, or a grisly mass shooting crime scene. No, Bongino, a former right-wing podcaster and conspiracy theorist, who is typically a tough-guy poser, went on the Fox News’ morning show “Fox and Friends”to whine about how taxing his new gig is. There’s more here than meets the watery eye.
People ask all the time, ‘Do you like it?’ No. I don’t.
FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR DAN BONGINO ON HIS FBI ROLE
“I gave up everything for this,” he lamented before adding that FBI Director Kash Patel typically works 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. and that “I’m in there at 7:30 in the morning.” Bongino said, “I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife — not divorced, but I mean separated, divorced — and it’s hard. I mean, we love each other, and it’s hard to be apart.”
After saying that the job has been tough on his family, he said, “People ask all the time, ‘Do you like it?’ No. I don’t.”
Cry me a river. Bongino is describing what anyone in a senior FBI leadership role is expected to endure, particularly at headquarters. I’ve been there, done that.
As an inspector and then chief inspector based in Washington, D.C., I had to live apart from family, travel extensively and fly home whenever a free weekend permitted. When I was named an assistant director, we agreed to let our son finish his last year of high school and then my wife joined me in D.C. And my experience was easier than senior executives at even higher levels. Entering the J. Edgar Hoover building before sunrise and leaving after sundown was the norm — for all of us.
Such personal and professional sacrifice isn’t limited to executives. Agents and professional specialists throughout the FBI’s field offices routinely miss family events, their kids’ birthday parties and games, and have their vacations and holidays disrupted. The same is true for career government servants across our institutions. Welcome to the real world, Mr. Bongino.
It’s not hard to surmise why Bongino felt it necessary to broadcast how hard he and Director Patel are working. Both are under increasing pressure from the Trump base to deliver on the conspiracy theories they promoted before Trump hired them and to expose the so-called deep state cover-ups they claimed existed. Moreover, Patel has been taking some heat lately on whether he’s taking his job seriously — especially after he showed up unprepared for a budget hearing in Congress.
Bongino seems particularly touchy about how he’s perceived. When he got wind that The New York Times might publish an embarrassing account of how he was injured trying to grapple with an FBI instructor at the bureau’s academy, Bongino tried to get out in front of it by issuing his own statement on X that confirmed he was no match for the FBI agent and that he got hurt. He said it was “not an ‘injury’ but a bit of swelling in my right elbow.”
Some of this transparent attempt at PR might be humorous if it weren’t consistent with Trump world’s misunderstanding of sacrifice. The president himself has equated the hard work he says he does with sacrifice and, most disgracefully, said it in response to a Gold Star family who said he’d “sacrificed nothing.” And at a public event this Memorial Day, President Trump extolled his own accomplishments in office.
In his 2019 book “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote about Arlington National Cemetery this way: “As we drove past the rows of white grave markers … I also thought of … all the sacrifices we’d have to make — giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals."
The president himself has equated the hard work he says he does with sacrifice.
The president’s net worth has doubled to $5.4 billion since he ran for re-election. Much of that increased wealth is coming from the Trump family’s engagements in the Middle East, including with an Emirates company that struck a deal to purchase $2 billion of a Trump family organization digital coin.
While the FBI’s deputy director bemoans his lot in life, and the president and his family get richer while pretending they’ve made substantial sacrifices for the country, perhaps they should consider the plight of Americans who work two jobs to make ends meet, the losses suffered by Ukrainians fighting for freedom, the horrors experienced by Israeli hostages and their families, and the agony of children in Gaza begging for a meal. Hard work is admirable, but if you’re going to complain about it, you’ll get little sympathy from me.
