WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump’s White House game-planned how to message the Jeffrey Epstein files during the summer of 2025, Dan Bongino was growing increasingly frustrated and angry.
He understood the vast interest in Jeffrey Epstein online, and he had repeatedly sounded the alarm to Trump’s team that the outcry over the DOJ’s bungling of the Epstein files was gaining momentum, as Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman reported for their book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”
Back in July 2025, the president wasn’t yet interested in releasing the files. The DOJ had briefed him on the contents of what they had, noting that much of it included child sexual abuse material and that a lot of the raw records contained unverified and unsubstantiated information, including about the president and some of his friends. The White House viewed the conversation as toxic and unnecessary (the president would later call out Democrats’ new fixation on the files as a “hoax”).
Trump’s advisors argued at the time that the president had weathered every possible media storm — and he could weather this Epstein one as well. Ultimately, the House and Senate would vote to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025, and Trump would sign it into law the same month. The files would be released in massive dumps in December and January.
But during the summer of 2025, Bongino repeatedly told the White House that Team Trump wasn’t grasping how big of a deal the Epstein drama was, telling White House advisors, according to The New York Times: “It’s not an online story. You don’t understand.”
Things came to a head when the DOJ and FBI put out a memo saying that they had concluded that there was no evidence Epstein had a client list. It also said that Epstein’s death was a suicide, that the Trump administration wouldn’t be releasing any more information about the Epstein case, and that no further investigation was warranted.
At the same time, they also released 11 hours of video footage from the Manhattan jail where Epstein was found dead. That surveillance video actually made matters worse, since it was missing a pivotal minute, from 11:58:58 to midnight on the night that Epstein died. That missing minute was later released, but it had only fueled angry speculation about a coverup.
Bongino was enraged by the memo and by the handling of the entire situation. He had argued to Patel that it would not at all align with their transparency promises, the NYT reports, and he pushed hard for the FBI seal to be left off the letter. While Patel reportedly agreed with Bongino on many points, he ultimately went along with what the DOJ and White House wanted.
In what Haberman and Swan described as a “volcanic mood,” Bongino shouted at Bondi in a Justice Department meeting with FBI staff.
“You f*cked this thing up from the start,” Bongino allegedly yelled at the former attorney general. “The way you’ve been talking about this — that dumb f*cking charade with the Epstein files, the ‘They’re on my desk’ nonsense, all the promises to the folks out there.”
Photographer: Alex Kent/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bongino and Patel were reportedly called into a Situation Room meeting with Susie Wiles, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Taylor Budowich two days later. Wiles immediately asked Bongino if he had leaked a story about Epstein and Trump to ABC News, the New York Times reports.
“I’ll tell you what,” Bongino reportedly replied. “I’ll give you $100,000 cash right now. I’m not kidding. Walk out to West Exec, put that reporter on speaker and get him to admit I leaked it. A hundred thousand dollars.”
When Wiles started to tell Bongino that “we all got ourselves into this,” he allegedly cut her off, saying, “No, no, no, no, no. We didn’t get ourselves into anything. I warned you guys about this the whole time, and you ignored me. And exactly what I said was going to happen happened. And now you’re pretending I was in on this. I was never in on this.”
His response startled the rest of the group, particularly given that Wiles was the White House chief of staff. Wiles reportedly pressed forward, telling Bongino, “Going forward, we’re all in. We’re all going to agree to move forward. Are you in or not?”
He reportedly responded: “No, I’m not. This is not my plan. I’m not part of this going forward. Forget it. I’m out of here.”
And, in an even more shocking move, Bongino “stormed out of the Situation Room and onto West Executive Avenue, where he climbed into the back of Patel’s armored SUV and directed the driver to take him to FBI headquarters.”
MAGA world lit up with rumors that Bongino would resign. Sources close to Bongino at the time told Daily Wire that he was threatening to leave the bureau if Bondi remained on the job, effectively issuing an ultimatum.
Patel also wanted Bondi gone, sources close to the FBI chief told The Daily Wire, saying that Patel would consider leaving the FBI if Bongino left.
“Blondie f*cked this whole thing up,” Bongino told a confidant, The New York Times reported. He was using a nickname for the attorney general coined by outspoken Bondi critic Laura Loomer. “She was the one on TV saying over and over they had all this stuff. There was never anything.”
“We were always clear about that,” Bongino emphasized, according to the Times. “But now everyone thinks we did something wrong. And I gave up everything.”
He stayed on until January 2026, when he resigned from the bureau and returned to hosting his “Dan Bongino Show.”
“Dan did a great job,” Trump told reporters, as news of Bongino’s departure broke. “I think he wants to go back to his show.”
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi had made things difficult for Patel and Bongino when she promised in a February 2025 Fox News interview that the Epstein list was “sitting” on her “desk right now to review.”
Her possibly greater misstep occurred during a White House briefing with influencers on the president’s agenda, according to the NYT. During that briefing, Bondi and her team walked into the Roosevelt Room carrying boxes and handed out binders to the influencers that she described as “The Epstein files.”
Swan and Haberman write that “the blood pressure of other officials in the room skyrocketed” — they did not know what was in the binders, and the binders hadn’t been vetted by the White House.
The president was about to meet with Prime Minister Keir Starmer before the press, and the news might possibly blindside him.
“One official, opening the binder, began flipping through pages to see if Trump’s name was mentioned anywhere,” they wrote. “A few pages in, right in the middle of the page, there it was.”
The binders didn’t actually contain anything meaningfully new, but after the influencers took photos in front of the White House holding them, word spread like wildfire on social media. Not only did the influencers feel duped by the lack of substance in the binders, but many of Trump’s supporters were seething on social media over what they saw as Bondi playing showman with the files without releasing anything meaningful.
The Epstein files, which will have all been released as of July 2026, include many mentions of Trump’s name but have not been found to include substantiated allegations against the president.
NEW: Photo obtained by @realDailyWire shows Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein together. To my knowledge, this photo hasn’t been reported.
Massive trove of Epstein files are expected to be released tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/OvFFbUQlXq
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) December 19, 2025
The DOJ noted that the batch released in January contained numerous “sensationalist” claims submitted right before the 2020 election, in an apparent attempt to stop Trump from winning the presidential election. Many of those claims don’t even include callback numbers, such as one graphic claim that the president raped a 13-year-old girl.
“Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Daily Wire on Wednesday.
“And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him,” she added.
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