Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said in an interview aired Tuesday that he lives in constant fear that he’ll face retaliation for unveiling what he described as systemic corruption at the agency.
During the interview, Bongino referenced “Crossfire” documents he discovered at FBI offices last year. The files pertained to the FBI’s investigation into allegations that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia during his 2016 presidential campaign, Bongino said. The documents, he claimed, proved that the FBI knew the whole investigation was “bulls— from the start.”
“The presidency could change — I hope it doesn’t — in a little over two years,” he said in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “You don’t think on election night, if we lose, like it’s not going through my head, like they’re going to send some thugs to my house?”
Bongino left the FBI in January, roughly 10 months after he started on the job. He said that since discovering the Crossfire files in “burn bags,” making a cryptic post about them, and ultimately leaving his position, he has feared retaliation. He mused that he worries his home will be attacked, or that he could end up in prison on bogus charges.
“It was the mother lode, and there was a document in there that we were never meant to find that was basically the keys to the kingdom on Crossfire,” Bongino told Hannity. “And the document was so sensitive we were not even to carry it outside of the office. I will never be the same. I’m being as serious as a stroke right now. I’m really, I’m scared.”
“Don’t think for a second that I don’t think every day, and this is what’s really sad … that they’re going to come for me,” he added. “Like I’ll probably be in some federal prison. That’s what comes to my mind every day. I live like this the rest of my life because I know how they are.”
Bongino compared himself to Trump, who faced numerous investigations in recent years and became the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges in 2023.
“Everything I did [at the FBI], I did with a dotted i and a crossed t. I brought in my own attorney from the outside … I said, ‘No, everything is going to be by the book,’” he said. “You know what? It don’t matter. They’ll rewrite the book, just like they did for President Trump … It happened to the president, and he went through just the worst destruction of civil liberties I’ve ever seen.”
Though he had a relatively short-lived tenure at the agency, Bongino said this week it was his intention all along to spend under a year at the FBI.
“I was pretty clear with [FBI Director] Kash [Patel] from the start that I used to tell him the line, I’ll flip the calendar for you,” he said. “I’ll come in. I’ll get to January. We’ll get all this done. I knew what we had to do, whether it was training reforms. We had to get rid of a lot of bad apples, reorienting the FBI back to violent crime. So it was kind of weird when I left to hear a lot of this, like, nonsense, conspiracy theory stuff.”
Bongino also revealed this week that he went to great lengths to root out leakers at the agency. Among his tactics was faking details about his schedule to determine what “snakes” at the agency were leaking information to the media, he told Hannity.
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“We had to play this little game,” Bongino said.
“There were two FBIs,” he added. “There was the FBI of your, you know, VCAC agents, violent crimes against children, white-collar agents … fugitive task force and some of these guys, I was just honored to be in the room. And then you had this other FBI, which was populated with, unfortunately, snakes is being nice, and it wasn’t always obvious which FBI they were in.”