Bongino was employed full-time with the NYPD from 1997 to 1999 before transitioning to the Secret Service.
In 2011, he departed from the Service to embark on a political journey, running as a Republican candidate for Senate in Maryland in 2012. Back then, his perception of his former employer remained highly favorable.
“The president was an outstanding individual,” Bongino stated regarding Obama in 2011. “From my experience, he was a remarkable father and a genuinely kind man, very nice to me.” In a memoir released in 2013, Bongino noted that Obama was “among a group of individuals I would have willingly laid down my life for.”
However, concurrently, Bongino began to chart a course that would eventually lead him to become one of the leading podcasters in the United States.
In 2013, he made an appearance on Infowars, engaging with Alex Jones about the recent Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. After Jones remarked on the Democrats’ increasingly authoritarian response to school shootings, Bongino responded by asserting that Democrats are not effective crisis managers but rather are “crisis leveraging [and] using a national emotional crisis to make you accept things that are simply false.”
A decade later, a court ordered Jones to sell off his assets to compensate the families of the shooting victims, amounting to $1.5 billion.
Bongino featured multiple times on Jones’ show leading up to his second unsuccessful congressional run in 2014, losing to incumbent Democratic Rep. John Delaney in Maryland’s 6th Congressional district.
During one of these Infowars segments, Bongino promoted the conspiracy theory suggesting that CIA operatives were instructed to stand down during the 2012 attacks on the US Special Mission and Annex in Benghazi, Libya.
In 2015, he launched his own podcast, The Dan Bongino Show, and the following year made a third attempt to win a congressional seat in Florida’s 19th Congressional District. Just days before the election, Bongino was caught on tape having a significant outburst with a Politico reporter, whom he labeled “a real disgusting piece of shit.”
In 2018, Bongino was given his own 30-minute program on the NRA’s station, NRATV. Throughout his show, he critiqued the investigations led by special counsel—and former FBI director—Robert Mueller, who was then probing Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 election.
Bongino promoted the conspiracy theory claiming that the Trump campaign was under surveillance, coining it “spygate” and referring to it as “the biggest scandal in American history.”
While discussing the backlash against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during one episode, Bongino declared, “My entire existence right now revolves around owning the libs. That’s all. The libs… have demonstrated through this Kavanaugh debacle that they are… pure unadulterated evil.”
His strong defense of Trump captured the attention of Fox producers, who booked him on numerous occasions during this time, seemingly marking the moment Trump first took notice of Bongino.
