Bongino served full-time in the NYPD from 1997 to 1999 before joining the Secret Service.
He left in 2011 to pursue a political career, running for Senate as a Republican in Maryland in 2012. At the time, his opinion of his former employer was still very positive.
“The president was a wonderful guy,” Bongino said of Obama in 2011. “From what I saw he was a wonderful father and a wonderful man and he was very, very nice and very kind to me.” In a memoir published in 2013, Bongino added that Obama was “one of a group of men I would have gladly sacrificed my life for.”
Around the same time, though, Bongino began to take his first steps on a path that would ultimately lead him to becoming one of the biggest podcasters in the US.
In 2013 he appeared on Infowars, where he spoke to Alex Jones about the then-recent shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. After Jones said that it’s “so over the top how authoritarian the Democrats have become,” in relation to the response school shootings, Bongino replied that Democrats aren’t crisis managers but are instead “crisis leveraging [and] using a national emotional crisis to get you to believe things that simply aren’t true.”
A decade later Jones would be ordered by a court to liquidate his assets to pay the families of the victims of the shooting $1.5 billion.
Bongino made multiple appearances on Jones show in the run up to his second failed congressional tilt in 2014, this time losing to incumbent Democratic Rep. John Delaney in Maryland’s 6th Congressional district.
During one of his Infowars appearances, Bongino boosted the conspiracy theory that CIA agents were told to stand down during the terrorist attacks on the US Special Mission and Annex in Benghazi, Libya.
Bongino began his own podcast, The Dan Bongino Show, in 2015, and a year later made his third attempt at winning a seat in Congress, this time in Florida’s 19th Congressional District. Just a week before the vote, Bongino was recorded having a full on meltdown while speaking to a reporter from Politico, whom he called “a real disgusting piece of shit.”
In 2018 Bongino was handed his own 30-minute show on the National Rifle Association’s station, NRATV. Bongino used his show to continuously hammer the work being conducted by special counsel—and former FBI director—Robert Mueller, who was at the time investigating Trump and allegations that Russia interfered with the 2016 election.
Bongino pushed the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign was being spied on, a situation he dubbed “spygate” and called “the biggest scandal in American history.”
During one show, discussing the pushback against the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Bongino said, “My entire life right now is about owning the libs. That’s it. The libs…have shown themselves through this Kavanaugh abomination of a process to be … pure unadulterated evil.”
His robust defense of Trump caught the attention of producers at Fox, who booked him hundreds of times during this period, and it appears to be at this point that Trump first took notice of Bongino.