Dan Bongino's babysitter
FBI leadership needs some adult supervision.
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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!
And so it fell to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, to roll out the red carpet.
“Thrilled to welcome Andrew Bailey as our new FBI Co-Deputy Director,” he gushed. “As Missouri’s Attorney General, he took on the swamp, fought weaponized government, and defended the Constitution. Now he is bringing that fight to DOJ.”
Swamp monster
Bailey’s tenure as Missouri’s AG was short and undistinguished. Previously he served as general counsel to Republican Gov. Mike Parsons, who appointed him as AG in 2023 when then-AG Eric Schmitt got elected to the Senate. Bailey immediately set about using his office — or abusing it, depending on your perspective — to burnish his MAGA bona fides.
He harassed trans people. He boosted conspiracy theories about President Biden and the “autopen.” He grew a beard.
He was also Johnny on the spot for any Trumpworld scutwork that needed doing. Like filing a trollsuit against the state of New York for daring to prosecute Trump for fraud, which he called “violating Missourians’ First Amendment right to hear from a presidential candidate in the 2024 presidential election.”
The Supreme Court studiously ignored this stunt, and a similar effort to intimidate the nonprofit news outfit Media Matters for America fell flat when Bailey tried to take the fake law he practiced in Missouri on the road.
In that case, Trump viper Stephen Miller hissed out a demand for state attorney generals to prosecute Media Matters for the “fraud” of pointing out that ads for major brands were showing up next to pro-Nazi content, and Bailey fell all over himself to oblige.
After executing what he clearly thought was a legal triple axel — subpoenaing Media Matters and simultaneously filing an enforcement action urging a state court to find the outlet in violation because it had sued to block a similar subpoena from Texas AG Ken Paxton — he found himself with his keister on the ice, blocked by a federal judge in DC from retaliating against journalists in violation of the First Amendment.
And despite regular appearances on right-wing media to boost his visibility, he seems to have gotten lousy performance reviews from Republican legislators in his own state.
“You’re asking for more personal service (funding), but you’re leaving $2 million on the bottom line,” groused state Rep. John Voss in February, when Bailey’s office demanded that the legislature increase funding for his office to staff up. “I honestly think the issue isn’t money. It’s something else preventing you from being able to hire attorneys.”
As the Missouri Independent reported, Bailey’s office spent only two-thirds of its $43 million budget allocation for fiscal year 2024 as it hemorrhaged staff unwilling to waste their time and talent suing Starbucks for not hiring enough white baristas.
Even Trump was underwhelmed by Bailey when he met with him during the transition. According to the New York Times, Bailey lost out on the AG job to Pam Bondi because “the president, who likes aggressive personalities, found him too laid back and somewhat lackluster.”
So what’s the milquetoast midwesterner doing back in DC?
Make something happen, man
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 shit, 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.
The “make something happen” man
Andy Bailey may lack prosecutorial chops, managerial skills, or federal government experience. But the man is definitely creative!
This is a guy who threatened Target because selling Pride onesies amounted to “potential interference with parental authority in matters of sex and gender identity, and possible violation of fiduciary duties by the company’s directors and officers.”
After a high school student in St. Louis was injured in an off-campus fight, Bailey claimed that the child was a victim of DEI and investigated the school for “prioritizing race-based policies over basic student safety.”
And he’s shown himself perfectly willing to defy court orders, something the Trump DOJ insists on from lawyers in its service. In July, Bailey almost got himself held in contempt of court after instructing prison officials not to release a woman exonerated after serving 43 years for a crime she did not commit.
In short, if you are looking for someone to launch 1,000 pointless investigations that stick it to “woke” and make Fox News hosts clap like giddy seals, then Bailey might be just the man for the job. He can definitely make stuff happen for purposes of the news cycle, even if that stuff inevitably flames out or gets enjoined by a federal court.
Or, as the editorial board of the Kansas City Star put it: “We expect that his task in the new job will be to push the legal limits of the FBI’s considerable powers in order to go after the president’s rivals and wage ideological warfare. That is, after all, how he used his platform in Missouri.”
And so Dan Bongino will soon be sharing his four walls in DC with a buddy. According to the Times, the administration is unwilling to fire him outright for fear that, “having him leave his job could undermine the president.” Instead they’ll let him kick around the building for a while until he gets bored enough to declare victory against the Deep State and take himself home.
In the meantime, Bailey will use the FBI to go after whichever corporation or state legislator or pregnant teenager will “win” the news cycle for Team Trump. It’s terrible for democracy, but it does generate tremendous content!
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
No words! This entire administration is like a bad TV soap opera only with far reaching consequences for the rest of us
Can someone share the outcome or how/why someone in his position came to oppose the release of a woman unlawfully convicted after serving 43 years and what the consequences were? Did police or prosecutors go to prison? Did she receive any compensation?