Right wing influencer Dan Bongino, a former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent who returned to public service last year as Deputy FBI Director and then found out that said right wing influence can go only so far when on the inside, has officially departed from his post as of Saturday, less than a year into his tenure as second-in-command of the US’s top federal law enforcement agency.

Bongino had reportedly come EXTREMELY close to quitting back in July right after the Justice Department leadership, acting on orders from convicted felon President Trump, had abruptly reversed on their previous pledges to release all the files on their previous investigations into Donald’s ex-bestie Jeffrey Epstein, yet was talked off the ledge and into a more orderly, gradual exit from the post. During that stretch the more pliant Trump ballsucker Andrew Bailey departed his job as Missouri Attorney General to take the completely made-up position of co-Deputy FBI Director.

Presumably Bailey will now serve as the sole Deputy FBI Director going forward. Whether he finds his current job more professionally fulfilling and rewarding than his previous elected leadership position – in which he sued the state of New York at the Supreme Court for interfering in the 2024 election by prosecuting then-former President Trump for interfering in the 2016 election and Starbucks for allegedly harming their customers through a decline in service quality wrought by hiring too many non-white baristas – is unclear, as is how Bongino will address the motivations behind his departure when (not if) he eventually returns to the MAGA propaganda grifter industry.

Being a muscle-necked hothead is and always has been Bongino’s brand and nothing about the mid-July reporting on the acrimony between him and feckless Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Epstein shitshow seemed far-fetched at the time – thus it’s a circumstantial certainty that he was talked off the ledge and into an orderly exit all these months later. There’s plenty to be said about Bongino and other far right conspiracy theorist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – ex-Congresswoman effective Monday – both having spent the entire Biden presidency with their forehead veins bulging turgidly for their Orange Messiah’s return only to wash out from their service to his glory under a year into his second reich, both exits closely connected to the Epstein fuckery.

But let’s stick to the plot and only bring up Greene as a dispositive contrast: Should she get into the podcast game she’ll have a lot less to explain to her audience about how the last year went – if she does get into MAGA media. Maybe she will, or maybe she’ll just withdraw from the public sphere and quietly live off her family fortune, who knows or cares what she ends up doing going forward.

Meanwhile Bongino, who as a hired bureaucrat spent the last year upholding his duty to refrain from public statements about internal conversations (give him that at least, sticking to a bedrock tenet from his Secret Service career prior to getting pilled), doesn’t really have other options if he wants to regain the clout and income he enjoyed prior to the seriously consequential fucking mistake he made accepting the FBI job offer from the Orange God Emperor less than a year ago. If he had been offered an exit ramp like, say, a position with ICE or CBP, some ambassadorship (lol), or even at a think tank or PAC loyal to Trump, then he would’ve taken it already so the fact that he’s ghosting the administration and its orbit altogether rather than just the FBI leadership is telling too.

Now of course there’s the solid likelihood that he’ll just muddle through it like he did the second half of 2025 after he was talked out of immediately quitting. His audience may very well just be far more grateful to have him back than they are suspicious over what exactly happened and, more damningly, what he knows about Epstein that they don’t. They could be open to forgiving and forgetting Bongino’s May 2025 assertion that Epstein killed himself alone and of his own volition in the federal lockup in Manhattan in 2019 and that Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with it. The fans might just not ask Bongino whether he was threatened with retaliation from the Trump Regime and/or effectively bribed into silence going forward. The now-former FBI Deputy Director very well could have a perfectly smooth time navigating the restart of his MAGA media career.

Or the pressure from the anticipated scrutiny of Bongino’s first comeback livestream could get to him and it’ll be a shitshow that’ll just come across as fake, forced, and uncomfortable to the no doubt much larger audience – which will include a shit ton of those outside the MAGAverse looking to read between the lines of every word he says. Maybe low-probability he fucks up and invites the high risk of making things worse for the Trump Regime that – even if Bongino remains politically loyal, or at least does a serviceable job at pretending he does – he unambiguously did not want to spend another three years of his life in service to, largely because of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

Ought to be interesting to see how Danny Bongohead handles this.