Tangle - Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to lead FBI.

Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to lead FBI.

Tangle by Isaac Saul / Feb 27, 2025

My take.

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Patel leading the FBI is the result of a phenomenon unique to Trump.

Even taking prior criticisms of the FBI and its leadership as valid, both Patel and Bongino are at another level of concerning.

Patel is an ultra-loyalist, Bongino is even more out there, and I’m not optimistic about the FBI under their leadership.

Let’s play a game.

I’m going to share seven quotes. Some of them are real things Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have said. Some of them are made up. Let’s see if you can spot the fake ones.

“We’re blessed by God to have Donald Trump be our juggernaut of justice, to be our leader, to be our continued warrior in the arena.”

“My recommendation is Donald Trump should ignore this [court order]... who is going to arrest him? The marshals? You guys know who the U.S. Marshals work for? The Department of Justice, that is under the — oh yeah, the executive branch. Donald Trump is going to order his own arrest? This is ridiculous.”

“The only thing that matters is power. That is all that matters. ‘No it doesn’t, we have a system of checks and balances.’ Ha! That’s a good one. That’s really funny. We do?”

“The irony about this for the scumbag commie libs is that the cold civil war they’re pushing for will end really badly for them. Libs are the biggest pussies I’ve ever seen and they use others to do their dirty work. Their mommas are still doing their laundry for them as they celebrate tonight that their long sought goal of the destruction of the Republic has been reached. But they’re not ready for what comes next.”

“My entire life now is about owning the libs.”

“And you've got to harness that following that Q [of QAnon] has garnered and just sort of tweak it a little bit. That's all I'm saying. He should get credit for all of the things he has accomplished, because it's hard to establish a movement."

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Just kidding. They’re all real.

1, 6, and 7 were things Kash Patel said. 2, 3, 4, and 5 are things Dan Bongino said. 

It’s not hard to understand how we got here. During Donald Trump’s first term, he surrounded himself with some of the shadiest and most corrupt people in politics. The Paul Manaforts of the world invited questions about his connections to Russia; those questions turned into a media frenzy; that media frenzy drove FBI investigations; those investigations led to a special counsel; that special counsel nearly cost Trump his presidency. 

I’ve written before about the many things we got wrong about Trump and Russia. I don’t want to relitigate them here, but I think Trump deserved to be investigated and also was not guilty of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election. As I feared at the time, one of the great consequences of the Trump investigation — the reason I desperately wanted the federal government’s probe to be on the up and up in every manner — was the politicized arms race that it set off. Once you open that Pandora’s box, there is no going back — especially not in the American partisan warfare of the 21st century.

Of all the ways the Trump investigation could have gone, our current reality is one of the worst possible iterations. Our politics have only become more polarized since 2016, and Trump just won reelection on a campaign largely centered on personal grievances and promises of revenge. He has no interest in depoliticizing federal institutions like the FBI; he wants to remake them in his mold. He has no interest in leaving anything in the past; he wants payback. He wants to fire every lawyer that was hired under Biden and fire every prosecutor that was involved not just in the “Russia hoax,” but also in prosecuting January 6, a day full of very real crimes. All of these motivations are evident in putting Kash Patel at the head of the FBI.

When Patel was first tapped by Trump, I wrote about a phenomenon I described as the “Trump circularity” — when Trump does some norm-breaking thing (for better or for worse) that puts all of our political footing onto new ground, which he then gets to mold to his own political advantage. 

Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are part of this circularity. Patel, at least, has some relevant experience, but I’m still not thrilled about him leading the bureau. He has openly promised retribution against Trump's political enemies, he’s made his career a loyalty show to Trump, he’s said the figure at the center of the QAnon cult should "get credit for all the things he has accomplished," he hawks dietary supplements to “reverse the vaxx n get healthy,” and he claims he’s going to crack down on leakers and prosecute journalists. He also still will not admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and we found out during his confirmation hearing he has a massive conflict of interest in China. 

Say what you want about James Comey or Christopher Wray (and there’s plenty to criticize), but neither of them is even close to as politically compromised as Patel. They’re not even in the same galaxy. And if the politicization of the FBI is a thing you are worried about and loathe, if you were mad about Comey undermining Hillary Clinton or investigating Trump, or upset Wray’s FBI raided a president’s home, then this is the wrong direction to go. This leads us deeper down the hole.

As for Bongino, well… he is somehow even more out there. Personal disclosure: Soon after Trump came into office in 2016, before he was a famous podcaster, Bongino was constantly spreading easy-to-debunk nonsense on Twitter, and I used to call him out on it. We tangled on social media pretty regularly, arguing and calling each other not-so-nice names. In response, he blocked me. And then I watched his star rise — slowly at first, and then all at once, and now he’s a major celebrity with the online right. Mostly, his fame was driven by the kind of nonsense I used to call him out for.

In this line of work, I’m always conscious of how my readers might view me, and I’m sometimes wary of being too hard on one side of the aisle for consecutive days. We have a politically diverse audience looking for fair takes and a diversity of viewpoints. But in the “my take” section, my promise is not to seek a centrist position or toe the line. Instead, my promise is to be honest, even if it’s inconvenient for me and risky for my business. And the honest truth is that Kash Patel is an alarming FBI director with a smattering of good ideas that, weighed against everything else he’s said and done, completely fail to reassure us that he will act apolitically and in respect of the law. I’m not naive and sycophantic about the government enough to believe the FBI is some deeply ethical, non-political organization; it isn’t, and never has been. 

But it just got a lot worse. 

Bongino leading these agents is just hard to fathom. He’s so radical (again, just read a few sample quotes above) and so power hungry that I struggle to imagine what he’ll try to do with so much control. My only hope is that there are still enough ethical and law-abiding agents and lawyers among the FBI’s roughly 38,000 employees to check Patel’s and Bongino’s worst desires. But I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about the odds.