\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2014which was why no one had been apprehended.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cinside job.\u201d Bongino\u2019s answer was astonishing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions, that\u2019s clear, and one day I will be back in that space\u2014but that\u2019s not what I\u2019m paid for now,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019t have evidence for and maybe didn\u2019t even believe.<\/p>\n
The problem here is not that Bongino is engaging in punditry. When properly done, pundits make arguments\u2014like the one I am making here\u2014based 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.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the first time that Bongino\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Nor is this the first time that a major conservative figure has admitted that they\u2019re 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\u2019s lawyers argued\u2014and convinced a judge\u2014that the then-host Tucker Carlson couldn\u2019t be held liable, because he was not \u201cstating actual facts\u201d and instead engaging in \u201cexaggeration\u201d and \u201cnon-literal commentary.\u201d There are other words for this. Lying is one of them.<\/p>\n
What Fox News said in court, moreover, was not what it broadcast on air. During his show, Carlson didn\u2019t simply offer opinions\u2014he insisted that they were not opinions. At one point, he prefaced a riff by telling viewers, \u201cRemember the facts of the story. These are undisputed.\u201d Really, they weren\u2019t even facts.<\/p>\n
The revolving door between conservative media and Republican administrations\u2014especially the second Trump administration\u2014might explain why the same behavior also pops up from spokespeople. During the first Trump administration, then\u2013Press Secretary Sarah Sanders claimed that \u201ccountless\u201d 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\u2019s team that her statement was \u201cnot founded on anything.\u201d In another instance, she dismissed a false claim that she\u2019d made in the briefing room with a self-negating \u201cI\u2019m an honest person.\u201d (She is now the governor of Arkansas.)<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwell over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.\u201d 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\u2019s office explained away his remark by saying that it was \u201cnot intended to be a factual statement,\u201d which is perhaps true in a deeper sense than intended: He had no interest in reality or in conveying it accurately to the public.<\/p>\n
The right\u2019s 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\u2014federal court, mainstream media, left-of-center outlets\u2014where Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino fans don\u2019t tread. What is unusual about Bongino\u2019s admission last week is that he made it on Fox News, where right-wing viewers could hear it. Then again, he didn\u2019t seem too worried, given that he told Hannity he\u2019d be back in his old role someday. When that day comes, everyone should know how seriously to take whatever he says.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches <\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani \/ The Atlantic<\/p>\n Life for 30-Somethings Is Getting More Stressful<\/p>\n By Faith Hill<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n When Mehta appeared on camera bouncing her newborn in her lap, that professor started laughing sympathetically. She\u2019d just read Mehta\u2019s 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\u2014for 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.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Illustration by Alicia Tatone<\/p>\n Explore. This year, gene-editing technology was customized to fix mutations in a single patient\u2019s genes for the first time, Nancy Walecki writes.<\/p>\n Watch. The loneliness crisis hits the latest episode of Saturday Night Live (streaming on Peacock), Michael Tedder writes.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, took an awkward victory lap last week. The bureau notched a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4538,3702,136,546,4560,9585],"class_list":{"0":"post-36484","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-admits","9":"tag-bongino","10":"tag-dan","11":"tag-days","12":"tag-lying","13":"tag-pundit"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n