On Sunday, President Donald Trump tapped Dan Bongino to be the next deputy director of the FBI. Like clockwork, the media began attempting to discredit Bongino’s qualifications by obfuscating his long law enforcement career. But the media aren’t actually concerned about his qualifications — they just want to undermine his credibility as deputy director of the FBI.
If you read the headline in The New York Times, you’d think Bongino is just a “Right-Wing Commentator” with no relevant experience. While Adam Goldman and Devlin Barrett briefly acknowledged Bongino’s law enforcement background, they quickly pivoted to suggesting his appointment is a radical departure from past FBI leadership and argued that selecting someone without FBI experience “raises startling questions” about his ability to oversee a massive agency with sweeping surveillance powers.
National Review’s James Lynch wrote, “Trump Taps Right-Wing Commentator Dan Bongino as Deputy FBI Director” and waited until the fourth paragraph to note that Bongino’s career has primarily been that of a law enforcement officer. Lynch peddled the faux outrage of the left that Bongino would, in Lynch’s terms, “corrupt the bureau’s nonpartisan mission.”
The Washington Post’s Leo Sands headlined his piece with a question: “Who is Dan Bongino, right-wing firebrand tapped to be FBI deputy director?” Sands wrote in his first paragraph that Bongino is a “former Secret Service agent and police officer turned right-wing media personality” whose appointment “marks an abrupt departure from those of the role’s predecessors, who were typically career FBI agents.”
But Bongino, aside from being a popular commentator, served as a New York City police officer from 1995 to 1999 before joining the Secret Service from 1999 to 2011, serving both former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bongino “received a Department of Justice award for his many successful investigations while assigned to a financial fraud task-force,” according to Southern Arkansas University. Bongino also “joined the elite Presidential Protective Division” in 2006 and “became one of the earliest tenured agents to be given responsibility for an operational section of the presidential detail.”
This isn’t the first time the press has sought to delegitimize and undermine a Trump pick, however.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was billed similarly as a “Fox News host” by left-wing press when his nomination was announced. CBS News reported in November that Trump would “nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense” and made just one mention of his service to this country throughout the entire piece. ABC News’ Kelsey Walsh, Lalee Ibssa, Soo Rin Kim, and Ivan Pereira wrote, “Trump taps Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as secretary of defense” and waited till the third paragraph to note Hegseth’s military career. The Associated Press’ Lolita C. Baldor and Tara Copp wrote that Trump selected a “Fox News host … to serve as his defense secretary, tapping someone largely inexperienced and untested on the global stage. …”
But the propaganda press wasn’t and isn’t concerned about Hegseth’s qualifications or Bongino’s. If the press were truly concerned about the qualifications of appointees and nominees, they’d have made a fuss when Pete Buttigieg, a small-city mayor, was tapped by former President Joe Biden to lead the Transportation Department.
