Dan Bongino and Kash Patel Spend 20 Minutes Patting Each Other on the Back Over Work at FBI: ‘You And I Did a Pretty Good Job’

Rumble/The Dan Bongino Show

FBI director Kash Patel and former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino spent more than 20 minutes patting each other on the back over their work at the Bureau on Tuesday.

During an interview with Patel on The Dan Bongino Show, Bongino told his former colleague, “I think you and I did a pretty good job, but you know, it really isn’t hard when you focus on the bad guys.”

Patel responded:

It’s not hard to do the job you signed up for if you’re allowed to do the job you signed up for, and President Trump and this administration backs law enforcement and gave us the resources and gave us the autonomy in you and I in running this building to remove the red tape, to remove the unnecessary approvals, and to get a thousand extra agents– that’s what we did, Dan. We put a thousand extra agents into the field from Washington, D.C. We permanently, permanently removed them from the national capital region and sent them across to every single field office, and what did that do? It allowed people to hit the streets and investigate crimes and it led to this.

Patel then held up a brochure boasting about the statistics in their controversial first year leading the FBI.

“This is one year in the making of true historic reductions in crime, and you’re talking about a 20% reduction in murder rate. You’re talking about a 32% increase in fentanyl seizures,” he said. “Dan, you’re talking about four top-ten arrests in one year, but as soon as you left, I had to add two more, so now we’re up to six. You know, I couldn’t let it stand at four, so in one calendar year, we arrested six of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives in the world!”

Bongino replied, “Good job. Once I saw it on the news, I was proud of you.”

“No, no,” Patel insisted. “Those six go to you. You laid the groundwork for it. You worked quietly behind the scenes. I’m just telling you.”

He concluded, “These numbers are truly historic and that was the foundational tectonic shift you and I put into place in the FBI.”

Prior to his departure from the FBI last month, Bongino received frequent criticism from conservatives over his leadership at the FBI – most notably over the Bureau’s handling of documents relating to the late serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – and Patel has continued to receive similar criticism since.

In November, a scathing report authored by 24 active agents at the FBI described the Bureau as a “rudderless ship” and “all f–ked up” under Patel and Bongino’s leadership.

Both men were accused of  having an “unfortunate obsession with social media” and being “too often concerned with building their own personal résumés,” with one source advising the directors to “stop talking, stop posing, and just be professional.”

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