Dan Bongino, the right-wing pundit who stepped down as the deputy director of the F.B.I. this month, announced on Monday that he would restart his popular podcast.
The podcast, “The Dan Bongino Show,” will resume broadcasting on Feb. 2, nearly a year after it ceased production while Bongino served a tumultuous stint in the nation’s top law enforcement agency. The revived version of the podcast will stream live daily on Rumble, the conservative video network, with an audio version distributed to podcast platforms.
“I’m excited to get back behind the mic and reconnect directly with the audience,” Bongino said in a statement. “We’re coming back bigger, bolder, and always unfiltered — exactly how people want it.”
The new version of the show will be released only as a podcast, and not also as a radio show, as it had before.
A former police officer and Secret Service agent who ran unsuccessfully for Congress three times, Bongino rose to prominence during the first Trump administration as a voluble, musclebound champion of the MAGA movement. On the earlier iteration of his podcast, he promoted conspiracy theories, including about Jeffrey Epstein and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and railed relentlessly against a panoply of purported liberal misdeeds.
That show frequently ranked near the top of the Apple Podcast charts and was downloaded more than 200 million times in 2023, according to Cumulus Media, which will handle the new show’s ad sales through one of its subsidiaries. Bongino is also the founder of The Bongino Report, a conservative news aggregator, and he has hosted a Saturday night talk show on Fox News.
He had no experience at the F.B.I. when President Trump asked him to serve under the agency’s director, Kash Patel. As deputy director, a post that involved overseeing dozens of field offices in the United States and abroad, he took part in investigations that debunked claims he had made in his career as a commentator.
After the F.B.I. arrested a man accused of planting pipe bombs at Republican and Democratic headquarters ahead of the Jan. 6 attack, Bongino distanced himself from one such previous claim — that the bombs had been part of an inside job orchestrated by the federal government.
“I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions, that’s clear, and one day I will be back in that space — but that’s not what I’m paid for now,” he said in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News in December.
Bongino also clashed with Pam Bondi, who, as the attorney general, oversees the F.B.I., over her handling of files related to the Epstein case. And his frequent, incendiary posts on social media alienated some rank-and-file personnel at an agency with a legacy of quiet professionalism.
In a lawsuit filed last September, a former F.B.I. official who directed the agency’s Washington field office accused Bongino of spending more time “creating content for his social media pages” than working on F.B.I. investigations.
Close observers of the Justice Department began speculating about his potential departure from the agency last August, when Andrew Bailey, then the attorney general of Missouri, was unexpectedly named the F.B.I.’s co-deputy director, appearing to diminish Bongino’s authority.
Reggie Ugwu is a Times culture reporter.
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