In a resurfaced video drawn attention to on X (formerly Twitter) in the wake of President Trump announcing his nomination to the position of Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), since-confirmed Deputy Director Dan Bongino, just a podcaster and FNC personality at the time of the clip, called for all the FBI agents involved in the stunning raid on Mar-a-Lago to be fired.
The interview from which the resurfaced clip came occurred on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News Channel in the wake of the FBI’s stunning raid on then-former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on August 8, 2022. In the interview, Bongino sounded off on the FBI’s North Korea-style tactics, alleging that they were perverting ideas about criminal justice long held in America. Bongino’s interview with Hannity on the matter occurred just days after the raid.
Beginning the clip, Bongino contrasted the seal-like clapping of the American media for the raid with Pravda, the Soviet propaganda outlet, claiming that the American media is somehow worse. As he put it, “How many freaking times are we gonna let the FBI interfere in an election? I mean, this is supposed to be a constitutional republic. I’m not crazy, right? Like, this is supposed to be a representative democracy. Banana Republic … we’re beyond a banana republic, we’re into like tin pot dictator, Third World style. This is embarrassing. At least Pravda didn’t pretend to be anything but state apparatchiks. ”
Continuing, the former Secret Service agent who is now the number 2 man at the FBI declared that everyone involved with the raid should be fired, from the reception to the top-level management. He said, “And then listen, I’ve been with you for a while. I work with a lot of decent guys. I’m done with the “rank-and-file” stuff, too. I’m done with it. If you took part in this, anyone who took part in this, anyone, I don’t care who you are, an analyst or an upper-level manager, the next president who comes in office, they should Schedule F as many people as they can in the federal government and fire every single person involved in this. Everyone. The receptionist in the FBI office who took a call on this should be fired. We are not a Third World republic, supposedly.”
Getting to his point about North Korea and the justice system, Bongino explained that Americans used to have very different ideas of crime and punishment than dictatorships, but then-President Biden and his FBI goons were letting the mask drop by acting like communist thugs. As he put it, “Sean, the difference between us and Kim Jong Un, right, is that we investigate crimes, and then we look for people. We don’t investigate people, and then look for crimes.”
Emphasizing that point, Bongino noted that the raid on Trump looks much more like the FBI in search of a crime than it trying to find who was responsible for one it already knew existed, saying, “That is exactly what’s going on. How many times are they going to investigate Donald Trump for how many different things before the American people wake up and realize this isn’t an investigation of a crime in search of a person, but a person in search of a crime.”
Concluding, Bongino noted that he had left his job in federal law enforcement because he disagreed with what was going on within it, so he has no patience for those making the “they were jsut doing their jobs” argument. Beginning that epic takedown of a concluding, Bongino said, “And let me just add, you know, one last thing on this, folks. You know, I left my job, so no one’s going to lecture me, ‘Oh, Dan, what would you do if you just…’ There’s no more, ‘We’re just doing our job.’ You swore an oath to the Constitution! Have some balls, man!”
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He added, on that same point, “I left my job because I couldn’t take what was going on. I gave up my pension and everything because something else mattered. You’re not going to lecture me on anything if you were involved in this constitutional abomination to our constitutional republic. You don’t deserve your job today, and you will get no backing from me or anybody I know in the conservative movement going forward. You flush your credibility down the toilet.”
Drawing attention to the old clip in a post on February 22, 2025, conservative podcaster and X personality Benny Johnson wrote, “
THROWBACK: Newly appointed Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino going full savage calling to axe every last fed involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid.” Watch the clip here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video