Under normal circumstances, the FBI has a director and a deputy director, with the latter helping to oversee day-to-day operations at the bureau. The Trump administration, however, isn’t normal at all, which helps explain why, last summer, the FBI decided it needed two deputy directors: Dan Bongino, a right-wing provocateur and podcast personality, and Andrew Bailey, who had served as state attorney general in Missouri. Neither had any experience at the FBI.
The experiment failed. Late last year, Bongino resigned and soon after returned to Fox News. And barely a year into his tenure, Bailey is exiting, too. MS NOW reported:
FBI Co-Deputy Director and former Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is leaving his post to spend more time with his family.
According to two people familiar with his departure, Bailey … was frustrated at not being named FBI director, a proposal once floated to him after Kash Patel had made numerous missteps and generated headlines that were unfavorable to the administration.
A related New York Times report added, “Mr. Patel and Mr. Bailey did not get along, and often went long stretches without speaking to each other, according to multiple people familiar with their interactions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.”
Time will tell whether and how the deputy directors are replaced, and whether the FBI returns to its more traditional leadership model, but in the meantime, as Bailey updates his résumé, it’s worth pausing to appreciate just how chaotic conditions at Patel’s bureau have been of late.
It was just last week, for example, when two veteran FBI counterterrorism supervisors were removed from their jobs — not because they had done anything wrong, but because they balked after being asked to conduct a threat assessment on a person believed to have been making harassing phone calls to Stephen Miller’s wife, conservative podcaster Katie Miller.
The special agent in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI’s Washington field office, Michael Burgwald, and his deputy, Courtland Rae, each have deep national security experience. They were transferred from their posts anyway.
This roughly coincided with a criminal hacking group stealing reams of sensitive personal data involving potentially tens of thousands of current and former FBI employees. Ciaran Martin, the former head of Britain’s cyberdefense agency, told The New York Times that the hack likely had a “huge impact on the operational capability” of the bureau and could rank as one of the most consequential data breaches in history.
About a week earlier, Patel thought it would be a good idea to briefly halt some cooperation with the FBI’s Canadian counterpart because Canada’s public broadcaster used phrasing related to 9/11 that bothered the FBI director.
