Dan Bongino Posts Cryptic Message, Says He’s Been ‘Shocked to His Core’
The newly discovered material “was not processed through the normal procedure, digitizing it, putting it in FBI records. We found it in bags hiding under Jim Comey’s FBI, and you’re going to be stunned!”
In a Saturday post on X, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino reminded his followers that, although the public isn’t privy to what’s going on behind the scenes at the FBI, “things are happening.”
Most significantly, he said that what he’s learned during the course of his work has shocked him down to his core: “We cannot run a Republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.”
During my tenure here as the Deputy Director of the FBI, I have repeatedly relayed to you that things are happening that might not be immediately visible, but they are happening.
The Director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization…
— Dan Bongino (@FBIDDBongino) July 26, 2025
The last we heard from Dan Bongino, he had taken a day off following a heated clash with Attorney General Pam Bondi over the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. He was reportedly very angry and needed time to decide if he should stay at the FBI or move on.
The catalyst was a joint memo dated July 6 from the Department of Justice and the FBI that stated a “systematic review” of the Epstein materials had uncovered no “client list,” and found no evidence that Epstein had either “blackmailed prominent individuals” or been murdered, contrary to earlier speculation.
Apparently, Bongino decided to remain in his position and returned to work the following Monday. We never heard precisely how, or even if, he and Bondi had reconciled their differences.
I have no doubt that Bongino is uncovering some astonishing information. And although this is pure speculation, he may be alluding to materials discovered in a previously unknown “evidence room” in the FBI building in late May — documents that reportedly dated back to the tenure of former FBI Director James Comey.
Discussing the material the FBI had stumbled upon in an appearance on Fox News’s Fox & Friends shortly afterward, Bongino said:
I wouldn’t call it hidden, but hidden from us at least and not mentioned to us, and then we found stuff in there and a lot of it’s from the Comey-era, and we are working our damndest right now to declassify. And just so you know, because I get the public, I totally understand people saying, ‘Well, do it now.’ The process is [that] not all information is ours to declassify; some is other intelligence agencies, it’s not– we literally can’t do it. Once that gets done and that gets out there, and you read some of the stuff, we found that, by the way, was not processed through the normal procedure, digitizing it, putting it in FBI records. We found it in bags hiding under Jim Comey’s FBI, and you’re going to be stunned!
Wait till you read this stuff.
It’s easy to forget what was unfolding in Washington, D.C., during the first two years of Trump’s first term. After Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, the bureau’s dubious Crossfire Hurricane investigation morphed into Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe. The legacy media took its cues from the odious Andrew Weissmann — the lead prosecutor on Mueller’s team — and the equally odious Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
Russiagate fever had swept the city. Under Weissmann’s direction, strategically timed leaks from the special counsel’s office to the press were a regular occurrence.
Meanwhile, Schiff, an obscure congressman who had arrived in Washington in 2001 but was virtually unknown, suddenly became a media star. He appeared on every left-leaning talk show, repeatedly claiming that evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia to win the 2016 election was “in plain sight.”
The Democrats’ propaganda mill was in overdrive, and their strategy was working.
On the right, three individuals, in my view, played the most pivotal roles in fighting back and exposing the truth behind the deception. The first was Kash Patel.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, launched an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Patel, whom Nunes brought on as a senior aide in April 2017, effectively led the effort.
Patel played a pivotal role in drafting the now-famous Nunes Memo, released in February 2018, which helped expose key facts. The investigation revealed that the FBI had presented the Steele dossier as the primary basis for a FISA court application — and three subsequent renewals — to surveil Carter Page. This, in turn, granted the bureau access to the Trump campaign’s communications and, eventually, to those from the early months of his presidency.
The second was Dan Bongino, who worked relentlessly — day after day, tracking each key figure — to methodically expose and dismantle the vast, coordinated conspiracy waged against Donald Trump. He reported his discoveries daily on his wildly popular podcast. Bongino summed up his findings in a best-selling book titled Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump.
[The third was investigative journalist and the current founder and editor of Just the News, John Solomon.]
I can only imagine how stunned former President Barack Obama, former CIA Director John Brennan, James Comey, and the rest of the key players must have been upon hearing that Patel and Bongino would be taking the reins at the FBI.
And if the information was enough to shake Dan Bongino to his core, then it must be truly explosive. I, for one, look forward to learning more.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
The moon landings were fake. Washington bureaucrats really are lizard people. It’s a cookbook.
Smedley Butler did it.
How to serve man.
On a more serious note, I’m shocked that evidence isn’t simply destroyed. Isn’t that what most of us assumed?
I think beyond a certain point, efforts to destroy evidence would have been too conspicuous — too easy for successive FBI officials to find. Or maybe Christopher Wray’s people didn’t know about the material in this room either. Who knows?
Or maybe Wray knew about it, and didn’t want to do anything about it.
But never anywhere near as easy as finding evidence that HASN’T been destroyed!
You wrote: “And if the information was enough to shake Dan Bongino to his core, then it must be truly explosive.”
Seriously? Bongino is a whack-a-doodle loudmouth. Not a serious person. I had the misfortune to hear his radio program a few times. A spinner of tall tales. His radio schtick was to create click bait. Lots of breathless claims, lots of “wait until you hear this”, etc. Little if anything ever came from the guy.
Perhaps on Russia-gate.
I’m on a different page with Epstein.
No client list. Game over? These were victimless crimes. I realize the hazards of putting too much weight in those girls words to take down titans, but there’s more than enough girls who can corroborate the list.
Why is Randy Andy the only titan to take a fall here?
Are we supposed to believe every tart that accused Trump of something where Duke LaCrosse level of zipcode can’t even be proven, but we can’t listen to any of these girls?
Have these girls been paid to not say anything. This is one of those things that just doesn’t wash.
The federal government is notorious for over classification of documents or records and there is much that should not be classified to protect a person’s reputation or conceal criminal Activity.. items are classto protect national security and international relations. The level of classification is based on how severe security or relations would be impacted. For example a list of visitors to Lolita Island contained U.S. politicians and foreign government officials, the US officials are not subject to classification but the id of foreign officials might be subject to classification. Maybe one of Legal Insurrection’s attorneys should provide a short brief on proper classification. Agency heads and their designees can classify and declassify agency originated documents. Some documents automatically declassify based on dates. Some agencies may classify to protect sources and methods of collecting info.
People who say that think like ordinary people. Try thinking like a criminal instead. You have a bunch of hard evidence of criminal behavior. You don’t trust the people who caused that evidence to come into existence and you know that they don’t trust you either. So instead of destroying it, like you’re supposed to, you hide it, in case you need it for leverage in the future.
Yes, and it most likely was, as I’ve seen stranger things when I was in the national security sector.
Obama’s true birth certificate and his lifetime membership card to Man Country?
I have my doubts that Bongino has uncovered hidden and astonishing information. If Dan did come upon new astonishing information that is damning, why is he taking to X and making Fox News appearances to announce it? My suggestions are to stay off X and Fox News with all the foreshadowing and hopium intrigue.
Life insurance?
Seems to me that announcing to the public that you’ve found documents hidden away in a secret room in the FBI building and that you’re working on declassifying them to release them to the public would be signing your own death warrant. There are definitely people out there that would do anything necessary to prevent the release of those documents.
Until there are perp walks and convictions, this has all the weight of a Republican strongly worded letter.
No matter the evidence, I don’t see how any of these sh*tlibs can be found guilty of anything in a jurisdiction full of other sh*tlibs.
As much as I detest these Leftists, I am not sure what they can be prosecuted for. What they did was treacherous, but it does not come under either treason or sedition. The best I’ve seen is conspiracy to defraud. Would that the media publish what they did, their reputations would be ruined, but the DemoncRat media are burying the story. They’re having too much fun with the Epstein business.
Conspiracy to defraud whom, of what? Fraud requires something of value being stolen from someone. Telling lies is not fraud. It can be defamation, it can be all sorts of things, but not fraud.
Theft is not a necessary element.
Fraud is using deceit or trickery in order to gain an advantage or unfair profit.
If a news story is presented as a factual account and is intended to deceive the public, it could be potentially classified as fraud.
If Bongino really has all these explosive documents, as a top FBI official it is irresponsible of him to make this sort of announcement on twitter or on Fox News.
Much like Bondi stating she had the Epstein client list on her desk and then having to recant that statement later.
It’s one thing to be a private citizen doing a podcast and breathlessly narrate all these conspiracy theories. Heck, MSNBC does it all the time. You’re trying to get viewers and ratings.
However, as a public official, one has to adhere to a higher standard. You’ve sworn an oath to uphold the law and provide justice. So fine, once you have done the leg work, gotten all the declassifications, made sure there are no legal impediments — go out and make your case to the public, based on the evidence you are releasing. Or convene a grand jury and make your case to them.
If you are not prepared to back up your words with evidence — right now — then as a law enforcement official you have an obligation to stay silent until you can.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” – Chuck Schumer(D) said during an interview on MSNBC, Jan. 2017
He said the quiet part outloud all those years ago. It’s a frightening admission. This horrific monster is at the left’s command to destroy their enemies with impunity.
The monster must be destroyed, and people must go to prison, or they will simply unleash the monster again – because why not?
It’s a federal government agency whose entire job description is to lie to everybody.
What could possibly go wrong.
So Dan Bongino found that Comey was worst than we thought and let us know, told us how he was worst than expected, why he was worst than expected and what he did that made the FBI operate in an unacceptable way.
Looks like the definition of FBI transparency because Dan Bongino is second in command of the FBI.
worse
Unfortunately, it does take time to get through all the information. Patience is a virtue. These players will be forever tarnished, however, except in the eyes of the unhinged and co-conspirators in media. They are sadly beyond repair. In any event, hope some people or groups come forward and lawfare these guys, especially Obama, so they can see what they did to damage us all.
Democrats will talk of the statute of limitations on all of this. Problem with that idea is that NY used Covid as an excuse on why the statute of limitations didn’t come into play when prosecuting Trump. So the precedence has been established.
No, they didn’t. The statute had run on the misdemeanor charge, but not on the felony charge; that’s exactly why Bragg charged him with the felony, and struggled to make it out to be a felony, because if Trump’s lawyers could just have brought it down to a misdemeanor the whole case would have had to be dismissed.
There was no felony, Democrat.
Bragg said there was a felony and then stated baldly that he was under no obligation to tell what the felony was.
In the jury instructions the jurors were told that it could be any felony they thought Trump had committed.
Kangaroos would be offended at this court.
The more you look the more you find.
The more you find the more you know.
The more you know the more you realize you’re never going to find out who Obama is or where he came from or how he got to the White House.
The simple Occam’s Razor answer is that this was always just a schtick and once in power they had to come up for reasons to keep the schtick going. It’s like the Soviets finding “Kulaks” to blame decades after the October Revolution.
“The process is [that] not all information is ours to declassify; some is other intelligence agencies, it’s not– we literally can’t do it.”
I know somebody who could. Maybe you should have a Coke with him.
“what he’s learned during the course of his work has shocked him down to his core: “We cannot run a Republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.”
Tucker Carlson, December 2022: “We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President? And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”
The problem with the Epstein memo is that it’s based on available evidence, not feels or speculation. If the FBI doesn’t have possession of actual evidence, they can’t claim he was murdered and they can’t claim there’s a client list. That doesn’t mean that it’s not true.
Absolutely spot freaking on.
maybe they *found* ( WILLING TO REPORT) THE OBAMA PAPERS in order to please Dan B…….
put him in charge of prosecuting the criminals of the left and lets see him rise to the occasion which I think he can do
Dan has become a drama queen, plain and simple.
Look, I love(d) Dan; however, to assert “[He] saw the tapes and ‘Jeff’ killed himself,” yet the DOJ/FBI releases an asinine video that neither shows the cell nor the entire ‘common area’ (and the cameras on that cell block conveniently were inoperative…yea, okay) is an insult to common sense.
Moreover, if he were really “shocked to [his] core” and “will never be the same,” then there is clearly cause for alerting CNN at 3:27am just before dozens of doors of power-players are breached after show-cause hearings demonstrating these “shocking” discoveries…clearly laws must have been broken to assert such nonsense.
It’s all an act; nothing to see here, folks, move along and nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize and don’t even ask what happened to the 850K emails related to the Epstein case that went missing on government servers.
The moment Pam was nominated and I did a 10 second Google search, only to find her on the campaign trail behind a podium declaring “Jeb can Fix it,” I knew the fix was in.