Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino told Sean Hannity's podcast audience this week that he deliberately planted fake scheduling details during his time at the bureau, then waited to see which ones surfaced in the press, as a way to identify agents he suspected of leaking to reporters.
The admission, made on a podcast episode released Tuesday, offers a window into what Bongino described as a deeply fractured agency where he and FBI Director Kash Patel could not always tell which personnel they could trust.
Bongino's account, first reported by The Hill, paints the FBI's internal culture during his tenure as split between two camps: agents doing serious investigative work and a second group he accused of undermining leadership from within. That characterization, and the leak-trapping tactic he described, raises pointed questions about the state of the nation's premier law-enforcement agency and the obstacles reformers face once they walk through the door.
Appearing on "Hang Out with Sean Hannity," Bongino said he encountered two distinct groups when he first began working at the bureau. One, he said, consisted of agents he respected, professionals focused on violent crime, child exploitation, and other serious casework.
The other group earned a harsher label. As Fox News reported, Bongino told Hannity:
"There were two FBIs trying to help you solve the A, B and C problems, and that's FBI one and FBI two. And then you had this other FBI, which was populated with, to say, unfortunately, 'snakes' is being nice."
Bongino said the challenge was not simply that bad actors existed inside the agency. It was that they were difficult to identify. He told Hannity that he and Patel sometimes relied on outside sources to vet individual agents, and even those sources got it wrong.
"And here's the problem, Sean. It wasn't always obvious which FBI they were in."
That uncertainty, Bongino said, led to real consequences. He described a pattern in which he or Patel would be told a particular agent was trustworthy, only to see information they had shared with that agent appear in media reports days later.
"It happened a couple times where they'd say 'Oh, you can trust John Smith,' right? And you trust John Smith, and then a week later, you see like a leak in the media, and you'd be like, I'm pretty sure that came from John Smith."
Frustrated by the cycle, Bongino said he decided to take a more active approach. He told Hannity he began to "start messing with people" by feeding them "innocuous" details about his whereabouts and schedule, details that were false. If those details later showed up in press coverage, he had a strong indication of who was responsible.
Bongino described the approach as a necessary game in an environment where trust was scarce.
"So, it was like we would play this, we had to play this little game."
He did not name specific agents or specific media outlets that published the leaked details. But his account suggests a workplace where senior leadership felt compelled to run counterintelligence-style operations against its own workforce, a remarkable state of affairs for the agency that is supposed to be running those operations against foreign adversaries.
The idea that political appointees at federal agencies face internal resistance is not new. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has made similar allegations about deep-state operatives working against political leadership at her own department. But Bongino's account adds specific, first-person detail to what has often been described in broader terms.
Bongino's time as deputy director lasted nearly one year. He left the bureau in January amid what has been described as a dispute with former Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Jeffrey Epstein files. The circumstances of his departure have not been fully detailed publicly.
His tenure, and Patel's leadership more broadly, drew sharp criticism from some quarters. A 115-page report released in December accused both Bongino and Patel of "spending too much time on social media and public relations." Patel, for his part, has pushed back aggressively against media criticism. He sued The Atlantic for defamation after the outlet published a profile alleging a pattern of drinking, unexplained absences, and paranoia about losing his job. Patel's defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic signaled that the FBI director had no intention of absorbing those allegations quietly.
Patel has also made headlines for claims that the FBI holds evidence relevant to President Trump's longstanding allegations about the 2020 election, assertions that have drawn significant attention from both supporters and critics of the bureau's current direction.
About a month after stepping down, Bongino relaunched his daily two-hour talk show on the Rumble video platform. He has since returned as a Fox News contributor, making his first appearance back on the network on Hannity's show, the same program where he made this week's leak-trap revelations.
The speed of Bongino's return to media underscores a pattern that has become familiar in this administration's orbit: political appointees move between government service and conservative media with little downtime, and the stories they bring back with them often land harder than anything they said while in office.
That dynamic cuts both ways. Critics will note that Bongino's account is self-reported and unverified by independent sources. He did not name the agents he suspected, the specific leaks he traced, or the media outlets involved. The "John Smith" example he offered on Hannity's podcast was explicitly a placeholder, not a real name.
Meanwhile, the FBI has undergone significant personnel changes under Patel's leadership, including the firing of roughly ten agents who had worked on the classified documents probe into Trump. Those moves have been framed by the administration as accountability and by opponents as political retaliation.
Bongino's comments raise several questions that remain unanswered. Did the leak-trapping tactic actually lead to disciplinary action against any agents? Were the suspected leakers ever confronted formally, or only informally? And if the problem was as pervasive as Bongino described, what does that say about the FBI's internal controls?
The broader question is institutional. If a deputy director of the FBI felt he had to run a shell game with his own staff just to figure out who was trustworthy, the agency's problems run deeper than any single personnel dispute. That kind of dysfunction doesn't develop overnight, and it doesn't get fixed by one appointment or one firing.
Bongino's account also fits a pattern that tensions within the administration's law-enforcement leadership have made visible: reforming a massive federal bureaucracy from the inside is a grinding, adversarial process, even when the reformers have the full backing of the White House.
None of this will surprise Americans who have watched the FBI's credibility erode over the past decade. From the handling of the Russia investigation to the classified-documents saga to the steady drip of internal leaks that always seemed to land in sympathetic newsrooms, the pattern Bongino described, an agency at war with itself, has been visible from the outside for years.
What's new is hearing a former deputy director say, on the record, that he had to set traps for his own people just to do his job.
When the people running the FBI can't trust the people working at the FBI, the problem isn't one man's management style. It's an institution that has lost its way, and a reminder that cleaning it up will take more than good intentions.
