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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3766 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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What's the story with Dan Bongino? The guy was super-excited to become deputy FBI director, and then 9 months in he just resigns without explaining anything and goes back to basically venting on the internet. What's up with that? Did something nefarious happen on the background? Did he bite off more than he could chew? Does he just prefer talking to doing?

Bongino first complained about how much his wife hated their new life in May 2025, implying that he would end up divorced if he stayed in the job. Sometimes politicians really do want to spend more time with their family - in my misspent youth I was a campaign manager in the City Council by-election resulting from one such incident. Naturally I took the opportunity to tease the resigning councillor about the difference between "resigning to spend more time with your family" and "resigning to spend more time with my lovely children" (which was not a Russell conjugation in this case).

Assuming that Bongino was happily married before he took the FBI job, he would probably be willing to risk his marriage to save America from a vast criminal conspiracy, but not to be a marginally above replacement performer in a prestigious bureaucratic job. Why FBI deputy director is the latter and not the former does not require explanation.

If that's the case, I totally understand. He's about my age, and at this age your family takes the priority. Especially if he discovered he's getting nowhere and may just end up divorced for nothing. We do need heroes on this stage but I don't thing we have any right to demand from some particular person to be a hero.

I think he had the view that the FBI just had a few bad apples to find.

The reality is that it's impossible to go into a job like that alone. He needed to come in like a hostile lord taking over during feudalism. He needed to bring in about 20 loyal people to protect him and keep an eye on things.

As things went down he was completely outgunned. The long term FBI employees know all the rules so they can slow walk his requests, try to trick him into breaking the law, drop hints about things they can charge his family members with, etc, etc.

With the poor Epstein handling he was just sitting there watching his credibility with his audience being destroyed while he was stuck in an office unable to accomplish anything.

Guesses:

  1. He learned something that made him decide covering up Epstein was better than releasing it and can't grok the cognitive dissonance.
  2. He learned Kash was willing to block him
  3. He found out that leading an organization from the position 3-4 levels removed from the actual information and not being able to absorb all of the root information but still being responsible for the decisions sucks. This goes double when trust breaks down between the layers.

Those seem like the most likely reasons to me.

He learned something that made him decide covering up Epstein was better than releasing it and can't grok the cognitive dissonance.

I think the whole Epstein thing is way overhyped by now. If the infamous "lists" ever existed, they are probably destroyed or lost now. We know who was friends with Epstein socially, and some of them will suffer for it, but some won't. The chances we would know who shared the sex crimes with Epstein, beyond vague unprovable accusations, are very low by now. It looks like Republicans oversold this story to their voters and weren't able to deliver, and now Democrats are exploiting it by pretending to be outraged by Republicans "hiding" some huge secrets, while the biggest secret is that what we have is what we'd ever get. Of course, nobody wants to be responsible for this overpromise and under-delivery, and somebody eventually will be appointed as a scapegoat.

He found out that leading an organization from the position 3-4 levels removed from the actual information and not being able to absorb all of the root information but still being responsible for the decisions sucks

That sounds plausible. FBI rot is probably very deep, and even Trumps considerable political power is not enough to bring on real reform. And without real reform all is left to make waves on the surface while the deep state life is unaffected in their depths. But he likely can't say it aloud because it'd sound like "Trump is weak", which Trump would not tolerate. The same happened with Musk and DOGE - the rot is just too deep for a quick victorious campaign, and Trump doesn't look like a person who can organize prolonged campaigns (neither he likely has resources for it anyway).

I on;y bring up Epstien in the first point because he's got a lot of tape talking about how important the case was to him before he gained power and his paradigm shifting without a clutch after joining the FBI. He hasn't backtracked on the other important things to him (Comey was indicted and they arrested someone in the Jan 6 pipe bomb)

I suppose since there's been no public movement on the Dobbs leak, it's possible what they found there led to his desire to leave.

Most probably, he found out that FBI work is just another office job, especially at the very top, not something from action movies.

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