Looking sincerely into the camera, Dan Bongino made a pledge to the viewers of his National Rifle Association Television programme.
Wearing a blazer and with an image of the stars and stripes behind him, he told his viewers: “My entire life right now is about owning the libs.”
Now, seven years later, the Maga podcaster will have power he could have only dreamed of to carry out his self-described mission after Donald Trump appointed him deputy director of the FBI.
Following a string of failed political campaigns, Mr Bongino started a podcast in his basement and quickly became one of America’s biggest conservative commentators.
He has used his platform to peddle a string of conspiracy theories about the agency he is set to lead, having previously claimed members of the FBI and CIA “unquestionably tried to rig both the 2016 and 2020 election”.
His programme, The Dan Bongino Show, pulls in more than 16 million listeners each month, and in 2020 his Facebook page was generating more monthly engagement than those of the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN combined.
Dan Bongino’s podcast pulls in more than 16 million listeners each month – Jason Koerner/Getty Images North America
But the appointment of the former Secret Service agent, who was part of George W Bush and Barack Obama’s presidential security detail, is controversial as the role is usually reserved for career FBI agents.
Mr Bongino will act as second in command to Kash Patel, the FBI chief, who scraped through his Senate vote last week.
His appointment places two staunch Trump allies with no FBI experience in charge of the country’s top federal law enforcement agency, sparking fears the US president will seek to use the agency to target his adversaries.
Mr Patel recently reassured the FBI Agents Association that he believed his deputy should be a bureau agent, the New York Times reported, which suggests Mr Bongino’s appointment was out of his hands.
Mr Bongino becomes the 20th former Fox News broadcaster appointed to Mr Trump’s administration.
While Trump loyalists such as Matt Geatz celebrated the appointment as better than a WWE “tag-team”, the appointment has drawn ire from some Republicans.
Gregg Nunziata, Marco Rubio’s former general counsel, said: “The Trump Admin is turning federal law enforcement over to unqualified, unprincipled, partisan henchmen. It’s unacceptable and conservatives need to say so.”
Born in Queens, New York, to John, a plumber and building inspector and Judy, who worked at a supermarket, Mr Bongino decided to join the NYPD after suffering physical abuse at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend.
In 1999 he joined the Secret Service and was assigned to help protect Hillary Clinton when she ran for Senate that year during which he claimed he received a “Ph.D.-level course in campaign management.”
He joined the presidential protective division in 2006 and was part of the team which protected Mr Bush and Mr Obama.
While in 2011 Mr Bongino described Mr Obama as a “wonderful father and a wonderful man” who was “very, very nice and very kind to me”, he later said he was the “most corrupt president in US history”, according to the New Yorker.
Mr Bongino formed part of the team that protected Barack Obama
After leaving the agency in 2011, Mr Bongino ran three unsuccessful political campaigns.
In 2012 he won the Republican primary to run for the Senate in Maryland on the message of shaking up a “broken” political system, but lost to Democratic incumbent Ben Cardin.
He was defeated by John Delaney in the race to become a Maryland congressman in 2014 and came third in the GOP primary in a congressional seat after relocating to Florida.
Following his third failed political campaign Mr Bongino began recording his Maga podcast from his basement, which was initially called The Renegade Republican, with a focus on “debunking” liberal claims.
His show, which he will pause to take up the role, has become one of the most popular programmes in the Magasphere and beyond, pulling in millions of listeners.
In an interview with the New Yorker in 2021, Mr Bongino made it clear he was aware of the power of his audience.
“The reality is, I’ve got a bigger footprint than you guys by tenfold, if not twentyfold. I don’t want to be an a–hole about it, but there’s nothing you can write that I can’t write back even worse. It’s asymmetric warfare. You’ll never win”, he said.
Mr Bongino and Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends at Fox New Channel Studios in June 2019 – Roy Rochlin/Getty Images North America
But his success is not solely down to his own nous, his wife Paula Bongino tracks his engagement to pinpoint which topics rile up his audience.
“She’ll be, like, ‘Dude, you are slaying it today,’” he previously said. “Because she has these metrics on the Excel spreadsheet.”
The podcaster, who bills himself as a crusader against the liberals, hosted a programme on the NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s network, between 2018 and 2019.
The father-of-two has used his platform to peddle a string of conspiracy theories such as that Mr Trump won the 2020 election and was named a “misinformation superspreader” by the New York Times.
A critic of the Covid vaccine mandate, Mr Bongino said he had the jab himself because he was in remission after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which made him vulnerable.
Mr Bongino used his platform to peddle a string of conspiracy theories – Phillip Faraone/Getty Images North America
He was banned from YouTube in 2022 for violating its policies on pandemic misinformation and Google pulled its ad services from his website.
He also had a show on Fox News called Unfiltered with Dan Bongino for two years from 2021 as well as a five-part series on cancel culture called Canceled in the USA on Fox Nation.
Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, previously told the New Yorker that Mr Bongino was “one of our generals” in the fight of “information warfare”.
In one episode of The Dan Bongino Show after the 2020 election, which was called “Resist”, he told his listeners “there’s nothing to concede because this race isn’t over”.
Mr Bongino, who lives less than an hour from Mar-a-Lago, has been a staunch Trump loyalist and pleaded with the US president to run again in 2024.
It was a symbiotic relationship: Mr Trump was also a fan of Mr Bongino’s work and would often retweet him and agreed to appear on his shows.
In one of his tirades in 2021, Mr Bongino relayed the idea of feeling like a “misfit” for his political views.
“The liberals are the man,” he said.
“They run big corporations. They run YouTube. They run Facebook. They run the government. We’re the real misfits, we’re the real rebels now.”
Now one of the “real rebels” will be at the helm of an agency he deeply mistrusts.
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