In Appointing a Babysitter, Todd Blanche Concedes Dan Bongino Can’t Match Andrew McCabe’s Competence
Forty days after Dan Bongino had to take a day off from work because he was so emotional about the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up, Todd Blanche appointed a babysitter for the podcast host.
Missouri’s far right wing Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, will serve as co-Deputy Director, which before Blanche arrived and turned DOJ into a vehicle for sex trafficking cover-ups, was never a thing.
Here’s how WaPo reported the appointment.
“Thrilled to welcome Andrew Bailey as our new FBI Co-Deputy Director,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on social media Monday evening. “As Missouri’s Attorney General, he took on the swamp, fought weaponized government and defended the Constitution. Now he is bringing that fight to DOJ.”
Fox News Digital first reported on Bailey’s appointment. Both Attorney General Pam Bondi and Patel provided comments to the outlet celebrating the move.
Multiple news outlets reported that Bailey was considered for a top Justice Department or FBI position at the beginning of the administration, but the president opted not to nominate him.
The FBI deputy director position does not require Senate approval and it was unclear how Bongino and Bailey will split the responsibilities of the job.
Bailey arrives at the FBI at a time when the bureau is facing intense criticism from Trump supporters over its handling of the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Before their positions at the FBI, Patel and Bongino had spread conspiracy theories about the case, suggesting that the FBI during the Biden administration covered up key details of the investigation to protect powerful people who may have participated in sex crimes alongside Epstein.
The move comes just as the FBI announced it will miss the deadline for turning over Epstein files to Congress, the kind of moment that might require better cover-up skills than releasing an obviously altered video as “proof” that Epstein killed himself.
Now, on the one hand, it’s easy to laugh your ass off at this move, which is tacit confirmation that Bongino is nowhere near as competent as, say, Andrew McCabe.
Bongino has wailed about how hard this job is. So now, I guess, he has a job share, the kind of accommodation you might make for someone with inadequate qualifications for the job.
On the other hand, I have suspicions that this is not so much about the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up and Bongino’s manifest incompetence. The move comes shortly after Kash Patel fired two senior officials, along with the agent who had been flying his plane (who also played a role in the Mar-a-Lago search and the Peter Navarro arrest).
The FBI has forced out at least three senior officials who found themselves at odds with President Donald Trump’s administration, including a former acting director who resisted demands to fire agents involved in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to people familiar with the dismissals.
Brian Driscoll, who briefly served as acting head of the bureau during the first weeks of Trump’s second term, was fired by senior leaders this week and will finish his last day Friday, said three people familiar with his departure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced personnel move.
Driscoll was given no reason for his firing, the people said. But during his brief tenure at the top, he earned the respect of much of the FBI’s rank and file after he resisted orders from Trump Justice Department appointees to identify hundreds of agents who had been involved in the Capitol riot investigations, which agents feared could signal a wider purge.
“I regret nothing,” Driscoll wrote in a farewell message to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. He added, “Our collective sacrifices for those we serve is, and will always be, worth it.”
Also dismissed this week were Steven Jensen, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, and Walter Giardina, an agent involved in the investigation that sent Trump’s former trade adviser Peter Navarro to prison, the people familiar with the matter said.
The firing of Driscoll and Jensen would already have required a new organizational structure, from the reorganization that Kash pushed through in March.
But I can’t help but thinking about the number of sensitive investigative steps at FBI that require high level approval — most famously, FISA warrants.
Everything at FBI runs according to the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (one, two), a big unwieldy guide meant to prevent the abuses of J Edgar Hoover. Not only do certain sensitive investigations — say, of journalists or members of Congress — require high level approval, in some cases from the Deputy. But the Deputy owns the document.
If you get a competently corrupt Deputy (Bongino certainly doesn’t have the competence) you could dismantle those protections in order to make the FBI a far more politicized entity.
Perhaps most notably, the appointment of Bailey comes the day after DOJ appealed a judge’s ruling that the FTC’s investigation of Media Matters repeats past attempts to infringe on the NGO’s First Amendment rights — a ruling in which Bailey’s own politicized investigation of Media Matters figured prominently.
Mr. Musk responded on November 18, 2023, by promising to file “a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters.” Id. ¶ 38 (quoting Elon Musk (@elonmusk), X (Nov. 18, 2023, 2:01 am), https://perma.cc/X4HN-PLJ4). He claimed that “activist groups like Media Matters . . . try to use their influence to attack our revenue streams by deceiving advertisers on X.” Id. ¶ 39 (quoting Elon Musk (@elonmusk), X (Nov. 18, 2023, 2:01 am), https://perma.cc/X4HN-PLJ4). As he saw it, Media Matters had “‘manipulate[d]’ advertisers and the public by ‘curat[ing]’ and ‘contriv[ing]’ in order to ‘find a rare instance of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow.’” Id. ¶ 39.
The next day, on November 19, 2023, Stephen Miller, the current White House Deputy Chief of Staff, in response to a post on X about the Media Matters article, stated that “[f]raud is both a civil and criminal violation” and that “[t]here are 2 dozen+ conservative state Attorneys General.” Id. ¶ 40 (quoting Stephen Miller (@StephenM), X (May 17, 2022, 11:12 am), https://perma.cc/5X5H-5QLN). Just a few hours later, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey replied to Mr. Miller’s post: “My team is looking into this matter.” Id. ¶ 41 (quoting Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey), X (Nov. 19, 2023, 4:46pm), https://perma.cc/J463- 656K). And the next day, on November 20, 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton “announced that he was launching an investigation into Media Matters, purportedly under Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.” Id. ¶ 42. That same day, Mr. Musk’s X Corp. sued Media Matters and Mr. Hananoki in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. See id. ¶ 45 (citing X Corp. v. Media Matters for Am., No. 4:23-cv-1175 (N.D. Tex Nov. 20, 2023), ECF No. 1).1 And in the “weeks and months” that followed, “X Corp., through its international subsidiaries, filed suits in Ireland and Singapore.” Id. ¶ 46
[snip]
And the Court again granted a preliminary injunction on August 23, 2024, concluding that the Missouri CID likely amounted to First Amendment retaliation. See Media Matters for Am. v. Bailey, No. 24-cv-147, 2024 WL 3924573 (D.D.C. Aug. 23, 2024). Media Matters and the Missouri Attorney General ultimately settled their dispute in February 2025.
We know that Bailey likes to use the power of government to infringe on Democrats’ constitutional rights.
Which makes his appointment as FBI Deputy exceedingly dangerous.
As Marcy knows well, if the US AG is the Bureau’s CEO, the Deputy Director is its chief operating officer, its top manager for day-to-day operations. Among many other things that entails are personnel decisions, as well as case management ones.
MO AG Bailey (and his predecessor MO AG and now-Senator Eric Schmitt before him) love to *use* “the power of government to infringe on Democrats’ constitutional rights,” but when folks stand up to them, he either folds or gets his ass handed to him.
For example . . . see the COVID-related suit filed by Schmitt and pursued by Bailey that I wrote up last fall, coming out of metro KC. File suits and the wingnuts send you money. Try them in court where they are forced to defense their authoritarian idiocy, OTOH, and they lose. Bigly.
From that post:
Trump may be bringing in a babysitter for Bongino, but I’m not sure how good a babysitter he will be. Especially if folks stand up to him in court.
As the folks in Texas might say, Bailey is all hat and no cattle.
So, maybe we can call this new partnership Bongley instead of Bailgino? I wonder if this is the solution that the Trump crew came up with after their plans to have a dinner meeting at the Observatory got trashed. Lev Parnas had claimed that they weren’t only meeting to talk about Epstein/Maxwell, but also to figure out what to do with Bongino.
Those that stand up in court may win, but it costs money–lots of money. On the other hand, we, the taxpayers, are funding the DOJ. It costs them nothing, and they don’t even give a shit about the department’s reputation.
The DOJ wants to win, but if they lose it is still a win.
Yesterday, an NPR interviewee described how well thought out the Executive Orders are, because they have been specifically designed to exploit the gray areas of the law. Those are where statutes haven’t been clearly defined, and nobody has worried about it, because it wasn’t considered that disingenuous operators would control all of government, and use it for their own purposes.
We still haven’t found a way to stop them.
We have found a way.
What we haven’t found is the courage to pursue it.
Too many Big Law partners caved, rather than fight, and that has cost them plenty of money and they’ve taken a huge hit to their reputation among clients and potential clients.
Too many Colleges and Universities caved, rather than fight. They, too have taken reputational and financial hits, with more hits coming now that Trump knows they back down.
Too many big businesses caved, rather than fight. Twitter made their bed, and now Bluesky et al. are eating their lunch, as fewer and fewer folks want to hang out in a Nazi dive bar. They caved, choosing to back Trump over Biden, and now find themselves floundering in the world of Trump’s tariff fights with the entire rest of the world. They caved, thinking it was the cheap and easy way to go, and now it’s costing them more than they ever imagined.
We *have* found a way. Now we need the courage to follow through.
Are they sharing the paycheck too?