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Top leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are struggling to fulfill Trump campaign promises often rooted in misinformation and conspiracy theories.
June 8, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
Dan Bongino, the intense and voluble media personality tapped by President Trump to be a top F.B.I. official, appeared on Fox News last month to deliver news that should not have been news: Jeffrey Epstein, he said with glum resignation, had not been murdered after all.
“I’ve seen the whole file,” said Mr. Bongino, sitting next to his boss, Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. “He killed himself.”
Investigations into Mr. Epstein’s 2019 death in a Manhattan prison cell found serious management errors but no evidence of criminality. Yet Mr. Trump, once a friend of the financier accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, has long suggested Mr. Epstein was silenced by shadowy clients of his sex trafficking ring. In a 2023 episode of his popular podcast, Mr. Bongino, now the bureau’s No. 2 official, implored listeners, “Please do not let that story go.”
They obliged. A Trump-allied podcaster suggested the F.B.I. leaders were “beholden to some unseen powers.” A former F.B.I. agent who has been critical of the bureau posted a parody of a law firm ad with Mr. Bongino standing next to a sign that read “Trust Me & Bro Consulting.” Tucker Carlson, a friend of Mr. Bongino’s, said Trump appointees were “making a huge mistake, promising to reveal things and then not revealing them.” Alex Jones, a founding father of the modern conspiracy movement, referred to Mr. Patel’s own handling of the Epstein case as flat-out “gaslighting.”
Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino, partisan showmen placed in positions previously held by people with greater experience, earned their bona fides in Mr. Trump’s camp by promoting conspiracy theories, making promises of what they would accomplish under Mr. Trump when he returned to power based on fictional or exaggerated premises, pledging to reveal deep-state secrets and vowing swift vengeance on their enemies.
It has now fallen on Mr. Patel, Mr. Bongino and Attorney General Pam Bondi to make good on the promises explicit and implied — or show how hard they are trying. But they are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves, critics say.
