There’s a new co-deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What do you mean you’ve never heard of a co-deputy director? Seemingly, neither has anyone else at the FBI. Nonetheless, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey will be joining the FBI to do the same job, apparently, as the current deputy director, Dan Bongino. Is Bailey more qualified than Bongino to do this job? Not really.
On Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel—both of whom are hilariously underqualified for their jobs as well—announced that Bailey, a stalwart Trump sycophant, was being tapped as co-deputy. This role seems to be a brand-new invention, an attempt to either prop up or ease out Bongino, who has proved less adept than Bondi and Patel at turning on a dime and discarding years of conspiracy theories about accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Poor dude seems to have believed that Trump would expose all the supposed elite blood-drinking Democratic pedophiles. Of course, Bongino was already being a whiny little baby about how un-fun it was that he had to do his job.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, shown in January.
Rather than telling Bongino to sack up or be fired, Trump instead settled on the genius solution of naming someone else to the same job. Unsurprisingly, there is no explanation whatsoever as to how job duties will be split, and all we know of Bongino’s feelings on the matter is a one-word post on X, “Welcome.” But hey, there were three American flag emojis as well, so maybe Bongino is hyped to have Bailey watching over his shoulder.
Bongino’s previous career as a Secret Service agent, right-wing podcaster, and conspiracy theorist in no way qualified him to be deputy director of the FBI, a job that is usually filled by a career staffer. Even Trump’s first-term deputy director pick after Andrew McCabe was forced out in 2018, David Bowdich, had been with the FBI since 1995. But these days, that’s way too qualified. While Bailey is a bit more low-key in his affect than Bongino’s sentient thumb-of-rage vibe, he’s no more able to run the FBI.
Like Bongino, Bailey has never worked for the FBI. He’s been in a variety of state government roles in Missouri, including counsel to the Missouri Department of Corrections, before becoming the state attorney general in 2023. The New York Times, in its ceaseless attempts to make Trump’s actions look normal, has spun Bailey’s hiring like this: “Despite his bombastic attacks on Democrats, Mr. Bailey is a more conventional choice for the role than Mr. Bongino was, given his time in government.”
It’s not even clear what that means. Bongino had a government gig as well, so Bailey is just another dude with different irrelevant government experience. This isn’t much of an improvement. It’s just a way to pretend that this move is somehow conventional when instead it’s just Trump piling another subpar candidate onto the public dime.
This must feel like a bit of vindication for Bailey, who apparently was passed over for the attorney general position now occupied by Bondi, and didn’t land the FBI director job he wanted, either. Since striking out there, Bailey has been trying to get noticed by Trump. So he’s turned his state attorney general's office into a mini-DOJ, with garbage like demanding Big Tech companies explain why their chatbots weren’t nice enough to Trump and suing Planned Parenthood over the abortion drug mifepristone. He must be so thrilled that his efforts have finally borne fruit.
Bailey can now join the other extremely meritorious Trump picks, like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. He can hang with the near-infinite number of Trump’s private attorneys who have been rewarded with administration jobs. But he’s probably crossing his fingers that he doesn’t end up with four different jobs like Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
All the best people, all the time.
