Dan Bongino, the intense and voluble media personality tapped by President Trump to be a top F.B.I. official, appeared on Fox News last month to deliver news that should not have been news: Jeffrey Epstein, he said with glum resignation, had not been murdered after all.
“I’ve seen the whole file,” said Mr. Bongino, sitting next to his boss, Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. “He killed himself.”
Investigations into Mr. Epstein’s 2019 death in a Manhattan prison cell found serious management errors but no evidence of criminality. Yet Mr. Trump, once a friend of the financier accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, has long suggested Mr. Epstein was silenced by shadowy clients of his sex trafficking ring. In a 2023 episode of his popular podcast, Mr. Bongino, now the bureau’s No. 2 official, implored listeners, “Please do not let that story go.”
They obliged. A Trump-allied podcaster suggested the F.B.I. leaders were “beholden to some unseen powers.” A former F.B.I. agent who has been critical of the bureau posted a parody of a law firm ad with Mr. Bongino standing next to a sign that read “Trust Me & Bro Consulting.” Tucker Carlson, a friend of Mr. Bongino’s, said Trump appointees were “making a huge mistake, promising to reveal things and then not revealing them.” Alex Jones, a founding father of the modern conspiracy movement, referred to Mr. Patel’s own handling of the Epstein case as flat-out “gaslighting.”
Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino, partisan showmen placed in positions previously held by people with greater experience, earned their bona fides in Mr. Trump’s camp by promoting conspiracy theories, making promises of what they would accomplish under Mr. Trump when he returned to power based on fictional or exaggerated premises, pledging to reveal deep-state secrets and vowing swift vengeance on their enemies.
It has now fallen on Mr. Patel, Mr. Bongino and Attorney General Pam Bondi to make good on the promises explicit and implied — or show how hard they are trying. But they are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves, critics say.
“Patel, Bongino and the other leaders are caught in a trap of their own making,” said Russell Muirhead, a politics professor at Dartmouth College who has studied the role of conspiracy theories in American politics.
“The world they helped create, a world in which conspiracy destroys facts, is now the world they have to inhabit,” he added.
Mr. Trump himself campaigned on the spurious idea that immigrant criminals had invaded the United States like a foreign army, but when courts began to reject that notion in a series of deportation cases centered on those his administration claimed had criminal records, his supporters blamed the judges, not him. He has flirted so often with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely holds that prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton are dangerous pedophiles, many followers still cannot fathom why Mrs. Clinton and other plotters are not in prison.
One former Republican congressional staff member with ties to the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted, said that the president’s courting of far-right conspiracists had stoked expectations, creating a never-ending cycle of demands. The person likened it to feeding red meat to insatiable sharks. Or zombies.
Ms. Bondi learned that the hard way during her first weeks in office, when she promised new revelations about the Epstein case and faced a furious backlash when the materials she released were a dud. Anxious about any criticism that could erode her standing with Mr. Trump, she dispatched F.B.I. agents and prosecutors from the Justice Department’s national security division to scour the archives, officials familiar with the situation said. They found little but are still digging, according to Mr. Bongino.
Mr. Patel and other officials have claimed that releasing new material is difficult, and governed by the need to protect witnesses and Mr. Epstein’s victims. The billionaire Elon Musk suggested another explanation in the wake of his falling-out with the president: Mr. Trump “is in the Epstein files,” he wrote on social media on Thursday, without providing evidence. “That is why they have not been made public.”
Spokesmen for the Justice Department and F.B.I. did not return requests for comment.
Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino have limited their interactions to friendly podcasters or conservative outlets, claiming that the mainstream news media cannot be trusted to convey the truth. But those engagements also reflect an understanding that sustaining support on the right is essential for their survival, according to administration officials.
“I’ve been putting out the truth my entire career,” Mr. Patel told Joe Rogan, the immensely popular podcaster who endorsed Mr. Trump, to explain his comments about the Epstein case. “Why would I risk all of it on this guy?”
But many people, including Mr. Jones, were not buying it. “Damage control,” he growled on his own show.
The tension between practicing politics based on conspiracy theories and having to govern extends far beyond the F.B.I. and Justice Department’s problems with the Epstein case. And those elevated to power by Mr. Trump know that the No. 1 rule is that he is never wrong, and that their role is to absorb the criticism that cannot be aimed at him.
Days after the backlash over his Epstein comments, Mr. Bongino offered other promises — new investigations into other episodes that have gripped the president’s base: the discovery of cocaine in the West Wing during the Biden administration, the leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning abortion rights in 2022 and the discovery of pipe bombs near Republican and Democratic Party headquarters before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, an unsolved crime that has already consumed significant law enforcement resources.
During another appearance on Fox, Mr. Bongino said the bureau was “closing in on some suspects” in the planting of the bombs, while claiming that “no one seemed to show any interest in this case.” In fact, investigators had conducted around 1,000 interviews, reviewed video evidence and chased hundreds of tips before he arrived.
Mr. Trump, far from distancing himself from fringe actors in his party after retaking office, has drawn them closer. Laura Loomer, who has baselessly claimed that the Sept. 11 attacks were “an inside job” and suggested school shootings were a ruse, has become a regular visitor to the White House with outsize influence on personnel matters.
In a lengthy social media post, Suzzanne Monk, an activist who pushed for the pardon of Jan. 6 rioters, wrote that the Trump coalition was fracturing into two groups: “Camp Be Patient” and “Camp Demand Results.”
Ms. Monk said she was firmly in Camp Demand Results, and called on the leaders of law enforcement agencies to immediately begin arresting “Deep State criminals” even before completing investigations into their actions.
“Stop touting the false idea that you have to ‘build an airtight case’ before arrest,” wrote Ms. Monk — who demanded new investigations into the assassination attempts against the president and the 2020 election. Her views closely tracked with X users who have plastered comments on Mr. Bongino’s account after recent media appearances.
Emerald Robinson, a former White House correspondent for Newsmax, made her frustration clear on social media. “Dan Bongino & Kash Patel know they destroyed their credibility by claiming that ‘Jeffrey Epstein killed himself’ so now they’re trying to offer up three investigations you don’t care about to misdirect you from the Epstein files you do care about,” she wrote. “Sad!”
It is perhaps unsurprising that some of the most significant pressure has come from the Jan. 6 rioters and their backers. Mr. Trump’s grant of mass clemency was not merely an effort to clear their names, but to rewrite history to advance their shared contention that he had won the 2020 election — the irreducible core of the political movement that returned him to power in 2024.
The pardoned rioters have emerged as the backbone of Camp Demand Results, questioning Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino almost from the moment they took office.
“Arrest the democrat criminals or resign,” wrote Philip Anderson, one of the Jan. 6 defendants. “The one and only thing we are telling you to do. And you refuse to do it.”
One of their first complaints was that the two had put a senior F.B.I. agent named Steven J. Jensen in charge of the Washington field office, which had overseen the inquiry into the Capitol attack. Mr. Jensen is a hated figure among the pardoned rioters because he was in charge of the bureau’s domestic terrorism operations section on Jan. 6, and played a key role in responding to the attack on the Capitol.
But the group’s grousing goes much deeper than Mr. Jensen, to demand that the F.B.I. reveal details about what the rioters believe is its involvement in fomenting the Capitol riot. But there is no evidence to back that up, according to a Justice Department inspector general’s report last year.
The J6-ers, as they are commonly called, are also outraged that Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino have not yet opened investigations into the federal prosecutors who worked on cases related to the riot, even though many of them have been fired, transferred or marginalized.
Whether by design or happenstance, Mr. Bongino, a former midlevel Secret Service agent and New York City police officer, has emerged as the bureau’s principal public defender, in addition to his official role running the bureau’s day-to-day operations. The strain seems to taking its toll.
“I gave up everything for this,” he lamented in another one of his Fox appearances. “I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself.”
There is a basic recognition among the president’s advisers and allies, at least in private, that expectations have been allowed to get too far out in front of the facts. But bridging the gap between campaign messaging and reality is never easy, particular in an administration that espoused maximalism, bravado and bending the truth to fit its tactical objectives.
Julie Kelly, a prominent right-wing journalist, recently appeared on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast, “The War Room,” to make the pragmatic case for finally letting go of the Epstein saga, which she described as “a freakish obsession” among Mr. Trump’s die-hard supporters.
Ms. Kelly said she understood the fixation on Mr. Epstein and the still-smoldering obsession with the F.B.I.’s investigation into connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. But she also said both cases were unlikely to result in prosecutions, and should be sifted out in favor of newer, more urgent inquiries.
But letting them die will be hard, she acknowledged, leaving Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino to grapple with the fallout.
“It’s a mess,” Ms. Kelly said. “I think people felt like there would be arrests, or at least hearings, where some of this stuff would be made public. What you end up with are extremely frustrated, disillusioned people who trash others who have put their careers on the line to do the right thing.”
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security for The Times. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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