Reading Between The Lines

🚨 BREAKING: Pam Bondi and Kash Patel have just appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as CO-DEPUTY DIRECTOR of the FBI, alongside Dan Bongino, per Fox. pic.twitter.com/XkIdqM8hf5

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 18, 2025

A couple of intriguing stories come from the FBI this morning. First is the move of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to become something called a "Co-Deputy Director" of the FBI, alongside the up-to-now not-Co-Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The replies to the X post are predictable; this is either a sign that Bongino is on his way out or a sign that Bondi and Patel need someone with prosecutorial experience who can lead a complex investigation. There is no reason both can't be true.

My view all along has been that Bongino bought his ticket back home when he walked off the job last month over Pam Bondi's handling of the "Epstein files". Since then, William Barr has echoed Ghislaine Maxwell in saying there's nothing in them that hurts Trump:

“He said that he had never seen anything that would implicate President Trump in any of this, and that he believed if there had been anything pertaining to President Trump with respect to the Epstein list, that he felt like the Biden administration would probably have leaked it out,” [Oversight Committee Chair James] Comer told reporters while Bill Barr was still behind close doors testifying.

Bongino caused a completely unnecessary crisis when the kerfuffle created an implicit suggestion that things might be otherwise. This confirmed my own suspicion that the guy is a grandstander and a lightweight; Trump had to waste whatever time it took to calm the guy down and get him to come back to work, at least temporarily. But the guy is clearly untrustworthy and unstable, and they can't keep him where he is long term, especially if they can put someone who's actually qualified into that job.

Another story gives glimpses of what must be going on behind the scenes at the Bureau:

Michael Feinberg, who was recently the assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s Norfolk field office in Virginia, left the FBI at the end of May after he claims his direct superior told him that FBI deputy director Dan Bongino was scrutinizing his longtime friendship with [Peter] Strzok, the disgraced FBI special agent who played a key role in the Trump-Russia investigation[.}

. . . Rather than take a polygraph test about his relationship with Strzok, Feinberg says he quit the FBI instead of risking the possible demotion he says he was facing in place of the big promotion to FBI headquarters which he had been expecting.

The FBI’s website says that “although we have used polygraphs to screen new employees for many years, since the 2001 Robert Hanssen spy case, we have also been requiring regular polygraph examinations of FBI employees with access to sensitive compartmented information.”

Feinberg's resignation in May came before the more publicized ouster of Brian Driscoll on August 7. Driscoll had briefly been Acting FBI Director immediately after Trump's second inauguration in January:

On January 31, 2025, as part of a planned mass termination of federal law enforcement officials under the second Trump administration, the FBI under Driscoll was ordered to fire eight senior executives and compile a list of potentially thousands of other employees involved in investigations stemming from the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Driscoll said that the list of such employees included himself and acting deputy director Kissane.] The order came from Emil Bove, a former criminal defense attorney for Trump who became the Trump administration's acting Deputy Attorney General. Driscoll refused to endorse the effort to purge agents as part of a political retribution and pushed back. He was fired by President Trump on August 7, 2025.

Along with Driscoll, two other FBI figures were fired the same day:

Former acting director Brian Driscoll, Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington Field Office Steven Jensen, and Washington-based Special Agent Walter Giardina were informed they are being fired, according to the two people, who were not authorized to discuss the matter. Formal paperwork is expected to be issued Friday.

. . . After Trump returned to office in January, some officials who worked on or supervised aspects of the Jan. 6 probe were allowed to stay in their posts or even promoted, but pressure from MAGA activists eventually led to many of those agents being dismissed.

That appeared to be the case with Jensen, who was installed by Director Kash Patel as head of the FBI’s critical Washington Field Office just four months ago.

. . . Jensen had been expected to attend a press conference Thursday with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington. But Jensen did not show up. Pirro was flanked instead by FBI official Reid Davis, the special-agent-in-charge in Washington for criminal matters.

. . . Giardina worked on aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. He was also involved in the arrest of Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro for refusing to testify before the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot. Navarro’s lawyers and a federal judge called the arrest unnecessary and questioned why he was not simply allowed to turn himself in. Navarro himself branded Giardina and the other agent involved in the arrest as “kind Nazis.”

The length of time between Driscoll's brief stint as Acting Director in January and his eventual firing in August suggests there was extensive investigation and some sort of deliberation that took place in his case, and likely the cases of Jensen and Giardina as well. Feinberg's dilemma over being polygraphed suggests this could also have been a factor in the August 7 firings. As of this past April,

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Monday it has started using polygraph tests to aid investigations aimed at identifying the source of leaks emanating from within the law enforcement agency.

“We can confirm the FBI has begun administering polygraph tests to identify the source of information leaks within the bureau,” the bureau’s public affairs office told Reuters in a statement.

. . . Donald Trump’s administration has been cracking down on people who leak information to journalists since he returned to office in January.

The effort to eliminate leakers and potential deep state moles from the FBI also suggests the Bureau is making serious moves in its investigations. It doesn't seem like too big a step to infer that Feinberg, Driscoll, Jensen, and Giardino were all fingered as potential leakers who could compromise investigations, and apparently like Feinberg, they may have been given the choice of taking a polygraph or leaving.

The A&E show Lie Detector: Truth or Deception features George Olivo, a retired FBI polygrapher. In a recent interview, he said he did a lot of counterintelligence work with the Bureau, but he wasn't more spectiic than that. He did say,

I love to interview people. And FBI investigations are very long. They can be two-to-four year investigations. And you don’t interview the main subjects until the end of the investigation. Usually it’s months of collecting information.

But the polygraph goes hand-in-hand with interviewing people every day.

. . . It can’t be stressed enough that what you see on TV or in the movies—that’s not the real polygraph. The whole protocol that’s used is different. The pre-test interview before the test is usually 45 minutes to an hour. You talk to the person, get their side of the story, construct questions in a way that’s fair to that person. We don’t use ‘gotcha’ questions; every question is scoped.

All I can think is that something like this is going on in the FBI now.