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Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, took an awkward victory lap last week. The bureau notched a major success by announcing the long-awaited arrest of a suspect in the placing of pipe bombs, neither of which exploded, outside the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committees on January 5, 2021.
Still, the arrest presented a complication for the Trump administration. The suspect, Brian Cole Jr., reportedly recently told investigators that he was a Donald Trump supporter who believed Trump’s bogus claims of fraud in the 2020 election. But various people in conservative media and politics have insisted for years that the pipe bombs were actually planned or placed by the government in order to make Trump look bad—which was why no one had been apprehended.
One of the most prominent backers of that claim was the podcaster and radio host Dan Bongino. Even the Fox News host Sean Hannity, one of the administration’s most sycophantic pundits, had to point this out during an interview on Thursday night, noting that before joining the FBI, Bongino had called the bombs an “inside job.” Bongino’s answer was astonishing.
“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. “I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”
Some liberal critics have been braying for years that the conservative press is full of hacks who will say anything in order to froth up their audience, regardless of truth. (Rage bait isn’t just the word of this year.) This criticism can feel shamelessly partisan and uncharitable. And yet, here Bongino is, blithely admitting that in his case, the critics are right: He was saying things he didn’t have evidence for and maybe didn’t even believe.
The problem here is not that Bongino is engaging in punditry. When properly done, pundits make arguments—like the one I am making here—based on facts and reasoning. Bongino, by his own account, was doing something else entirely: He was telling his audience that a claim (that the bombing was an inside job) was a fact, when it was not only not true but also not based on any real circumstantial evidence.
This isn’t the first time that Bongino’s prior pundit life has complicated his current role as No. 2 at the FBI. While working as a podcaster, Bongino frequently discussed Jeffrey Epstein and questioned the official narrative about his prosecution and death, which was ruled a suicide. Since joining the FBI, however, he has endorsed many of the Epstein claims he ridiculed.
Nor is this the first time that a major conservative figure has admitted that they’re just making stuff up. In a 2019 lawsuit, a woman who alleged a sexual relationship with Trump sued Fox News for defaming her by accusing her of extorting the president. Fox News’s lawyers argued—and convinced a judge—that the then-host Tucker Carlson couldn’t be held liable, because he was not “stating actual facts” and instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.” There are other words for this. Lying is one of them.
What Fox News said in court, moreover, was not what it broadcast on air. During his show, Carlson didn’t simply offer opinions—he insisted that they were not opinions. At one point, he prefaced a riff by telling viewers, “Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed.” Really, they weren’t even facts.
The revolving door between conservative media and Republican administrations—especially the second Trump administration—might explain why the same behavior also pops up from spokespeople. During the first Trump administration, then–Press Secretary Sarah Sanders claimed that “countless” FBI agents had told the White House that they had lost faith in FBI Director James Comey prior to his firing. This was true only insofar as the agents literally could not be counted: Sanders admitted to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team that her statement was “not founded on anything.” In another instance, she dismissed a false claim that she’d made in the briefing room with a self-negating “I’m an honest person.” (She is now the governor of Arkansas.)
No party has a monopoly on lying, but the right has an unusual habit of happily admitting to spreading nonsense. In 2011, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, a Republican, said that abortion accounted for “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” Putting a faux-precise number on a false claim is a classic technique for trying to make the claim seem more legitimate, but that kind of statement also attracts scrutiny; Politifact has the real number closer to 12 percent. Kyl’s office explained away his remark by saying that it was “not intended to be a factual statement,” which is perhaps true in a deeper sense than intended: He had no interest in reality or in conveying it accurately to the public.
The right’s worst factual offenders are forced to make these kinds of admissions all the time, which one might think would undermine their credibility among their audiences. But thanks to our siloed media environment, these statements are usually made in places—federal court, mainstream media, left-of-center outlets—where Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino fans don’t tread. What is unusual about Bongino’s admission last week is that he made it on Fox News, where right-wing viewers could hear it. Then again, he didn’t seem too worried, given that he told Hannity he’d be back in his old role someday. When that day comes, everyone should know how seriously to take whatever he says.
Related:
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case about Donald Trump firing a member of the Federal Trade Commission; conservative justices signaled they may roll back a key 1935 ruling and give the president more power to fire independent officials.
- Paramount has launched a hostile $108 billion bid to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, just days after Netflix reached its own agreement on Friday to buy the company’s studio and streaming assets. The move sets up a shareholder fight as Warner’s board continues to back Netflix’s offer. Trump has signaled that he might weigh in.
- Trump announced a $12 billion aid package for U.S. farmers; most of the funding will go to onetime payments for row-crop producers hurt by the trade war with China.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic
Life for 30-Somethings Is Getting More Stressful
By Faith Hill
Clare M. Mehta, an Emmanuel College psychology professor, was livid. She was on a committee for hearing graduate students defend their dissertations, and she had planned meticulously to accommodate their next Zoom. She had a two-month-old daughter, no child care, a working husband, and just enough time between his meetings to attend her own. Then, the day of, another professor dashed off a casual note: Could they start the meeting 15 minutes early?
When Mehta appeared on camera bouncing her newborn in her lap, that professor started laughing sympathetically. She’d just read Mehta’s 2020 paper on the life phase from age 30 to 45, which described it as a hurricane of major changes and responsibilities. Career advances, marriage, parenthood, homeownership, care for aging parents—for many people these days, the paper had argued, all of those milestones fall in a short and furious chunk of time. And here Mehta was, embodying that point.
Read the full article.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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