Mother Jones illustration; Gripas Yuri/Abaca/Zuma; Mattie Neretin/CNP/Zuma
At the end of May, conservative radio host turned FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced on Twitter/X that the agency would reopen three Biden-era cases: an investigation into who planted pipe bombs outside the DNC and RNC headquarters in January 2021, another on who leaked the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, and—surely, the most pressing of all—the mystery of who dropped a half-empty bag of cocaine inside the White House in 2023.
Bongino and Patel are trying to transition from demanding to know the truth to being in a position to provide it.
On June 3, FBI Director Kash Patel also said he would investigate whether previous, non-MAGAfied versions of the agency participated in “anti-Catholic targeting,” part of a wave of federal inquiries into whether the United States government has previously harbored anti-Christian bias. About a week later, Patel also told the far-right Epoch Times that he would investigate “possible Chinese influence” in what both he and the outlet called “riots” in downtown Los Angeles. (The Epoch Times is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, which opposes the ruling Chinese Communist Party.) For good measure, Patel also recently claimed on Fox News that one of his predecessors, James Comey, tried to rig the 2020 election. And he tweeted just days ago that the FBI has “has located documents which detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP.”
“We’re now here to clean it up,” he tweeted in May, regarding Comey’s alleged role in the supposedly rigged election, “and the American people are about to see a wave of transparency.”
It’s unlikely, if not impossible, that any of these investigations will produce substantive new information. As the New York Times recently wrote, the conspiracy enthusiasts like Bongino and Patel who were tapped to be Trump Administration senior officials are running “what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.”
But their primary mission isn’t to actually prove these claims, but instead to keep rolling new ones out—preferably at such a pace that no one has time to track any previous promises. These ludicrous claims of sweeping disclosures and big reveals serve several functions: they’re a way to keep a conspiracy-minded base engaged and enthusiastic, and to distract from the ongoing outrages, embarrassments, and various failures of the second Trump term. They also preserve the propagators a place in the conservative media ecosystem, where each of these officials will, if nothing more lucrative emerges, inevitably go when their time in office concludes. Like a celebrity promising they haven’t forgotten their roots, making constant promises to uncover the rot and corruption within the government is a way to make clear where their loyalties still lie.
Many of the Trump administration’s most famous figures are deeply engaged in the right-wing and conspiratorial internet. Bongino, for instance, had a long career as a conservative talking head, while HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which pumps out largely false anti-vaccine, anti-5G, and anti-GMO content at a furious clip. In office, senior Trump officials have devoted a lot of time and attention to ideas that circulate mainly in those right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: whether hundreds of thousands of children went missing under the Biden administration, whether the September 11 attacks were in fact a “controlled demolition,” or whether there were two shooters responsible for the JFK assassination. In some cases, Trump administration officials are content to simply bring these ideas up in public forums, without much followup. At other times, they mention these supposed mysteries, coverups, and scandals to pledge that they are doing something about them.
But where the conspiracy rubber has met the doing-their-jobs road, the outcome has usually been disappointing. That pattern emerged early, at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s showy “release” of new files concerning dead billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, where a cadre of conservative influencers waved binders full of supposedly previously unreleased information. The stunt failed when it became clear the material wasn’t actually new. Bondi moved on to soon promise that, working with Patel, she would release an Epstein “client list,” which has not happened thus far, because such a concrete list likely does not exist. In May, Bongino and Patel also angered the MAGA faithful by declaring that Epstein died by suicide, contrary to years of conspiracy theories that Bongino himself helped promote. Bongino has since tried to placate his angry fans by promising there’s “more coming” from the Epstein files.
Making constant promises to uncover rot is a way to make clear where Trump officials’ loyalties still lie.
Before taking charge of the FBI, Patel worked as an advisor to Trump and a director at Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that owns Trump’s social media platform TruthSocial. (He’s one of several administration officials who have been tied to TMTG, as has Bondi.)
During his time at TMTG, Patel worked especially hard to capture the interest of the QAnon community as part of a strategy to attract users. As Media Matters has reported, he and TruthSocial CEO Devin Nunes both heavily promoted an account on the platform that tried to sound like it was operated by “Q,” the supposed intelligence operative at the heart of that conspiracy, who left breadcrumbs of purported clues about a fantasy battle that Donald Trump has secretly waged against a Deep State cabal of famous Democrat pedophiles and child-sacrificers.
Patel also went on various QAnon-promoting podcasts to urge their listeners to join TruthSocial, saying that they were exactly the audiences the company hoped to attract. “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences,” he said on one such podcast, “because whoever that person [Q] is has certainly captured a widespread breadth of the MAGA and the America First movement. And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.”
Gathering a “strong, dominant” and loyal following was the game all along: an audience hotly expecting new disclosures and revelations around every corner is an inherently loyal one.
As a term, “disclosure” actually originates in the UFO community: it refers to the idea that the government is preparing to finally reveal what they know about UFOs and extraterrestrials. The QAnon movement played a similar game at its height, promising that the secret battle Donald Trump was waging would soon be made public, with mass arrests to follow. Thousands of the faithful followed along, poring over every “Q drop,” every piece of dubious evidence, every new cryptic non-revelation. Like a soap opera that ended each episode on a cliffhanger, a constant promise of what could be coming next kept audiences engaged and ravenously steadfast.
QAnon as a discrete idea began to peter out when Trump left office the first time without frog-marching a single Hillary Clinton-supporting pedophile into prison. But QAnon’s traces remain everywhere, not least in the knowledge that it is a savvy marketing tactic to repeatedly promise that evildoers will, someday soon, be revealed.
Today, with the conspiracy world full of ever more competing storylines, theories, and hoped-for outcomes, the idea of disclosure remains a singular focal point of longing; that someone high up, somewhere, will finally tell us what we are desperate to know. Against that backdrop, Bongino, Patel, and other Trump figures are still awkwardly trying to transition from demanding to know the truth to being the people in a position to provide it.
In the meantime, Bongino and other Trump figures are continuing to create content by churning out endless tweets, sending performatively verbose press releases, and making appearances on partisan news channels, all aimed at heightening their own profile and shifting blame from anything they have not yet achieved. Where before they cast themselves as independent investigators calling on a shadowy government to reveal its secrets, now they’re forced to play new roles, as dedicated and diligent public servants. This is, of course, boring: “I gave up everything for this,” Bongino lamented recently on Fox & Friends.
It’s still early enough in the second Trump term that these figures can act like brave truthtellers, and frame their efforts as digging through files that previous administrations were either too cowardly or too corrupted by Luciferian pedophiles to face. In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Patel claimed that upon taking office, he’d discovered a secret room inside FBI headquarters, a “room that Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building” filled with “documents and hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of.”
“My guys are going through that right now,” he said, adding that the room contained “a lot of stuff.”
“They’re so arrogant,” Patel said, referring to some unspecified evildoers. “They think, ‘No one’s going to catch us. I’m going to write everything down. We’re going to put it in a lock box. We’re going to put it in a vault, and no one’s going to find it. Well, guess what? I found the vault, and now I’m going to work.”