FBI "Top Priority" Cases

Not your mama's Bureau

Tonight’s post, about a story that hasn’t been heavily covered, got a little bit longer than I try to run. But it’s an important story with implications for the dangerous level of politicization that is quietly unfolding at the FBI under its new management. I hope you’ll read it to the end.

Recently, FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Don Bongino, gave an exclusive joint interview to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. Despite the friendly venue, it didn’t go well. The criticism from the right was fast and furious—the Twitterati conspiracy theorists wanted to see more prosecutions of Democrats who weaponized DOJ and other parts of government, and weirdly, people who visited Epstein’s “sex island”—they seem to assume they’re all Democrats, or maybe MAGA-faithless Republicans.

In a clarifying tweet, Bongino said he and the Director “made the decision to either re-open, or push additional resources and investigative attention” to three cases:

• The D.C. pipe bombing investigation involving bombs found ahead of January 6 outside of DNC HQ (before joining the FBI, Bongino asserted it was an “inside job”).

• The discovery of a bag of cocaine in an area frequented by visitors to the White House during the prior administration (frequently linked to presidential son Hunter Biden’s acknowledged cocaine use, although the discovery post-dates his recovery and no evidence linking it to him or any other Biden family member has ever surfaced, despite Trump’s insinuation).

• The leak of the opinion in Dobbs, the Supreme Court case that reversed Roe v. Wade (There is at least some reporting suggesting this was the work of “a conservative.” So, who exactly would this renewed prosecution threaten?).

These are all old cases that were previously investigated and closed without prosecution, presumably because the person responsible couldn’t be identified or the evidence was too weak to obtain a verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s an unlikely band of priorities significant enough for the director and the deputy director to personally promote. Bongino said he’s receiving weekly briefings on the progress in the cases; it's hard to imagine he doesn’t have bigger fish to fry.

The FBI’s website explains that its mission is to “protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” Its primary investigative functions include “domestic and international terrorism, foreign counterintelligence, cyber crime, public corruption, civil rights, organized crime/drugs, white-collar crime, violent crimes, and major offenders”

Planting destructive devices outside of political party offices in connection with major political strife is definitely on that list. But the incident happened near the end of the first Trump administration and law enforcement did not hold the sort of periodic briefings we are used to seeing in the wake of major events like a mass shooting or a bombing in the days following the U.S. Capitol being overrun. When FBI Assistant Director in Charge Steven M. D’Antuono made remarks at a press conference on January 12, he didn’t mention the bombs, so we don’t know a lot about developments early in the investigation, when evidence is freshest.

We also don’t know alot about what happened after the Biden Justice Department took it over, except that they never developed a prosecutable case and ultimately released video to ask the community for tips. It’s possible that they have a good idea of who it is but lack sufficient evidence or that they have no idea at all. But, having worked on a number of cases involving explosive devices, I can tell you those are cases where federal, state, and local law enforcement partners work together to expedite investigation and identify subject—no one wants to leave the bomber loose in the community regardless of who he is (and it’s almost always a he). Although it can take months, even years, for the subject’s identity to emerge, those cases aren’t abandoned. Improved technology can yield new information from old evidence. But these cases aren’t ignored, even when they linger for years, as one prosecutor retires they package the investigation and the evidence and share it with someone younger who will be there for many more years (I have been on both sides of that transaction). In other words, Bongino may have designated new or additional agents to work the case, but it’s highly unlikely it had been forgotten and was in need of resurrection.

If a suspect/suspects can be developed, it would be a worthy prosecution. But the bag of cocaine in an area so many people walk through that no case was made at the time it was found? The DOJ led by Merrick Garland, the one that permitted the Hunter Biden indictments wasn’t really in the business of doing the White House personal favors. And the leaked opinion in Dobbs, which the Supreme Court investigated internally and then just stopped talking about? It’s tough to see either of these as viable cases. They are far likely to involve the newly politicized Justice Department launching political narrative ahead of the midterm elections.

While it’s not unheard of for a new administration to reopen an old case, that’s usually reserved for situations where new evidence has been developed. It’s unprecedented to do it in such a rank political fashion. But this is the same Justice Department where Ed Martin, whom Republican Senators had indicated was unconfirmable as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, now runs a “Weaponization Working Group” inside of Main Justice that he says will “name and shame” people it can’t prosecute. That’s definitely not one of the functions of the Department of Justice. Martin said, “There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them.” DOJ policy explicitly prohibits naming people who are not charged, as Individual-1 from the prosecution of Michael Cohen could undoubtedly explain.

In case you’ve forgotten, Dan Bongino is a former U.S. Secret Service agent and failed candidate for the Senate who became a wildly successful conservative commentator. He was a host on Fox. He had one of the most popular radio shows replacing Rush Limbaugh. He received a permanent YouTube ban for promoting misinformation, but his podcast was the seventh most popular in the U.S. before he left for the FBI gig.

The deputy director oversees day-to-day operations at the FBI and is usually drawn from the career ranks at the Bureau. Bottom line, it’s a tough job and you need to know the guts of the operation. Bongino is the first person to hold the job who didn’t come from the career ranks of FBI agents and while his background as a Secret Service agent may give him a wee slice of insight, that’s a long way off of understanding how to run a shop that employees more than 37,000 people around the globe and considers itself to be the world’s premier law enforcement agency.

A year ago, Bongino, also a 2020 election denier, threatened Democrats on Twitter, calling them “scumbag commie libs” and warning "things will end really badly for them.” He closed with this statement (I’m sorry to reprint it, but it’s important context): "Libs are the biggest pussies I've ever seen … But they're not ready for what comes next." A screen shot of the now-deleted tweet (the entire account is gone) is here.

The start of Bongino’s tweet has been mostly overlooked but is worth our attention. He wrote, “The Director and I will have most of our incoming reform teams in place by next week. The hiring process can take a little bit of time, but we are approaching that finish line. This will help us both in doubling down on our reform agenda.”

Reform teams? I may have missed it in the press of news but haven’t seen mention of this before. There is always room to retool agency operations and change of administrations is a good opportunity, but characterizing it as “reform,” as though the Bureau is a bunch of troubled youth needing correction, probably won’t go down well with career personnel. And speaking of career personnel, they don’t seem to be involved here, since it sounds like Patel and Bongino are hiring from the outside. Bringing in people who don’t understand the Bureau, its work, how it’s done, and so forth, or perhaps agents who were previously disciplined and have an axe to grind sounds like a recipe for disaster. And, with echoes of DOGE, what are the odds of confidential information being compromised by those who lack sufficient experience to understand how it should be handled? The Bureau has internal self-assessment, conducted by people with the authority to review investigations and access evidence—for instance grand jury material that it’s a federal felony to share outside of the investigative team absent circumstances that wouldn’t be present here. But apparently institutional knowledge isn’t what new leadership wants to use here.

The hope in a situation like this is that the gravitational pull of the institution encourages new political appointees to do the right thing. But that has never been the trajectory with Trump’s appointees. Given Bongino’s past commentary, much of it sharply critical of the FBI and its work, there’s no reason to assume a safe harbor for professionalism here, particularly in light of these early signs of willingness to adopt a political agenda. in February of this year, Bongino said on his podcast, “If you swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States as an FBI agent and engaged in a tyrannical investigation against Donald Trump with partisan intent and not the Constitution in mind, you do not deserve your job.” Anyone who has worked as closely with the FBI as a former Secret Service agent has know that the agency isn’t exactly full of liberals, if anything it’s the opposite. He also knows agents don’t pick their cases for the most part and anyone involved in investigating Donald Trump was assigned. In fact, there was extensive reporting that in the classified documents case, DOJ was slow to executive the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago that turned up hundreds of classified items because FBI agents didn’t want to do it.

In November of 2023, I started writing to you about explicit reasons—not just atmospheric concerns— to believe that if Trump returned to office he would retool much of the federal bureaucracy, politicizing the civil service and undermining more than a century of laws aimed at preventing corruption and cronyism in the federal government. Trump made it plain that he would reinstate the October 2020 executive order he had signed—and which Joe Biden promptly rescinded on his first day in office—that made it possible to reclassify and fire career employees that a president wanted to single out. It was all in Project 2025. It is all in the works four months into this new administration.

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We’re in this together,

Joyce