"On Monday, the Trump administration announced that Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey will be appointed “co-deputy director” of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
It’s an odd arrangement. As the Washington Post
notes, the deputy director is usually a career official with a deep understanding of the FBI’s structure and staffing, not someone with zero federal prosecutorial or investigative experience. There’s also the awkward fact that the position is currently occupied by former right-wing griftcaster Dan Bongino.
Assigning Bongino a “
babysitter” is hardly a vote of confidence, and all he could
manage on Twitter was a terse “Welcome.” He did punctuate it with three American flags, though! ...
The problem appears to be that Bongino and his boss, FBI Director Kash Patel, are terrible at their jobs.
Most recently, they found themselves
crosswise with the MAGA base they so assiduously cultivated in private life after announcing that — contra their
prior public blustering — Jeffrey Epstein really
did kill himself. Then they followed up by releasing an
obviously doctored video to prove it.
The backlash after Bondi walked back her promise to release the “Epstein client list” was so fierce that it reduced Bongino to a raging tantrum, after which he failed to show up for work. But while the Epstein fiasco was the most public demonstration of Bongino and Patel’s incompetence, it was hardly the only one.
“I gave up everything for this,” Bongino whined on Fox News in May, apparently shocked that the job that required him to do more than shout into a microphone a few hours a day. “I stare at these four walls all day in DC, 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.” (Why Mrs. Bongino can’t join her husband in DC was left unexplained.)
And Patel was apparently so offended at the suggestion that he rarely shows his face in the Hoover building that he sued MSNBC commentator Frank Figliuzzi for noticing it.
Bongino was momentarily able to stanch the bleeding by promising the faithful that he’d seen some ****, man, and would soon unleash the retribution he’d so long predicted.
But despite this solemn vow to strike a blow against the Deep State, Bongino and Patel have done little more than fire a few career civil servants and reshuffle the org chart. Clearly if Trump wants the FBI to do more than harass DC residents, he’ll need someone more creative than these two."
FBI leadership needs some adult supervision.
www.publicnotice.co