Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said in a podcast released on Tuesday that he occasionally spread false information to identify “snakes” within the FBI who he believed were leaking details to the media.
Bongino told Sean Hannity on the Fox News host’s podcast “Hanging Out with Sean Hannity” that when he first started working for the agency, he encountered two different groups, one of which he called the “good FBI,” made up of agents who investigated crimes against children and white-collar crime.
“Then there’s another FBI that has snakes in it, and unfortunately, snakes are friendly,” he told Hannity. “The thing is, Sean. It’s not always obvious which FBI they’re in.”
He said it took him and FBI Director Kash Patel some time to figure out whether individual agents were “part of the good FBI or part of the bad FBI” and that they sometimes relied on outside sources for help.
“Sometimes they make mistakes,” Bongino said. “It’s happened a few times that they’ll say ‘Oh, you can trust John Smith,’ right? You trust John Smith, and then a week later you see a leak in the media and you’re like, I’m pretty sure this came from John Smith.”
Bongino said he then decided to “start pissing people off” by providing “innocuous” details about his whereabouts and timeline in an effort to weed out alleged leakers who he could confront if the story later appeared in headlines.
“So, like we’re going to play this — we have to play this little game,” he said.
The FBI’s operations under Patel have been frequently criticized, with a recent report in The Atlantic detailing Patel’s alleged alcoholism, unexplained absences from work and paranoia about losing his job. In response, Patel sued the magazine for defamation.
Bongino reportedly left the bureau in January after a dispute with former Attorney General Pam Bondi over documents on Jeffrey Epstein. Bongino has faced the same criticism during his nearly year-long tenure.
In a 115-page report released in December, active and retired FBI agents and analysts accused him and Patel of “spending too much time on social media and public relations.” One source also described Bongino in the report as “a bit of a clown.”
About a month after resigning from the FBI, Bongino is back in the public eye with the relaunch of a daily two-hour talk show on the Rumble video platform. He also returned as a Fox News contributor, his first return to the network on Hannity’s show.
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