Andrew Bailey, who has served as deputy director of the F.B.I. as part of an unusual leadership arrangement, is leaving the job after a little more than a year, the second such departure amid the turbulence in federal law enforcement agencies under the Trump administration.
An internal F.B.I. email indicated Mr. Bailey was stepping down for family reasons, according to people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a move that was not yet public. In recent months, people familiar with the inner workings of the agency have described the arrangement between Kash Patel, the director, and his two deputy directors — Mr. Bailey and Christopher Raia, a longtime F.B.I. agent and manager — as rocky.
Mr. Patel and Mr. Bailey did not get along, and often went long stretches without speaking to each other, according to multiple people familiar with their interactions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
For decades, the bureau has operated with a single deputy director, a career F.B.I. official overseeing daily operations and reporting to the director, who is appointed by the president. But President Trump upended that tradition by naming the right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino, who had been a Secret Service agent but had no experience at the F.B.I., as the No. 2 to Mr. Patel. In essence, that put two firebrand influencers with scant management experience atop the 35,000-person agency.
Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino had a sometimes strained relationship with Mr. Trump’s first attorney general, Pam Bondi, whom they blamed for mishandling the release of files related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. She in turn complained about Mr. Patel’s management of the bureau, including his propensity to post premature or inaccurate information about continuing operations.
In August 2025, the Trump administration announced a novel arrangement, saying that Mr. Bailey would come in as a co-deputy director alongside Mr. Bongino. At the time, Mr. Bailey was serving as the attorney general in Missouri, a post he had used to pursue Republican lawsuits pursuing culture-war issues.
Many agents inside the bureau believed that Ms. Bondi, herself a former Republican state attorney general, had brought in someone to serve as director in waiting if Mr. Trump ever tired of Mr. Patel. But Mr. Trump fired Ms. Bondi in April, and Mr. Patel outlasted Mr. Bailey.
In the interim, Mr. Patel had sidelined him, and Mr. Bailey left little imprint from his year at the bureau. His appearance when the F.B.I. executed a warrant to see 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Ga., was notable not just because of the legal and political dispute over the inquiry — an effort to press on with Mr. Trump’s baseless rigged election claims — but because it was extraordinarily rare for Mr. Bailey to play a visible role in any operation.
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