Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino blasted The New York Times for a “hit piece” about President Donald Trump’s “politicized” FBI.
“This NY Times article is precisely why hard-working Americans simply do not trust the media,” Bongino wrote on X Saturday. “The article is a poorly thought out hit piece which attempts to address the dramatic personnel changes we’ve made, along with the enterprise-wide reorganization Director Patel and I have undertaken.”
The Times’ brutal takedown said that the agency has lost Americans’ trust.
This NY Times article is precisely why hard-working Americans simply do not trust the media. The article is a poorly thought out hit piece which attempts to address the dramatic personnel changes we’ve made, along with the enterprise-wide reorganization Director Patel and I…
— Dan Bongino (@FBIDDBongino) July 5, 2025
“Among [Trump’s] many efforts to weaken American democracy and amass more power for himself, his politicization of the F.B.I. is one of the most blatant,” the Times’ editorial board wrote.
By turning the FBI “into an enforcement agency for MAGA’s priorities,” the Times wrote, the Trump administration has put Americans’ safety at risk.
“The public—on which the bureau relies for tips and cooperation—has to trust that agents operate without political bias,“ the editorial board wrote. ”By abusing that trust, Mr. Trump, Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino have put the reputation and effectiveness of the F.B.I. at risk. In doing so, they are risking the safety of the American public.”

Under the leadership of FBi Director Kash Patel, the agency expelled division heads overseeing national security, cybersecurity, and criminal investigations, including many who had persecuted Jan. 6 insurrectionists and investigated Trump.
Bongino acknowledged the agency’s “reorganization” but claimed it has made the organization stronger: “Kash and I have aggressively reformed the FBI,” he wrote.
Bongino shared a list of accomplishments that “[prove] that the decision Director Patel and I made to refocus manpower towards fighting violent crime, and combating terrorism, is working.” One of the key points he celebrated was apprehending, imprisoning, and deporting “over 18,000 illegal aliens.”
Indeed, the Times took the FBI to task for merely serving as backup support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement rather than prioritizing other law enforcement efforts.

Before Patel assumed his position as head of the agency, he called the FBI “an existential threat to our republican form of government,” full of “political jackals” who tried to “suffocate the truth” in order to steal the 2020 election. He also claimed that the FBI paid X, then Twitter, to censor conservatives.
Bongino, meanwhile, has called the FBI “the single most corrupt law enforcement institution” in America and a “full-blown leftist political action committee.”
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