Thoughts on Dan Bongino
And all the things he's angry about
Good Morning:
This is all the explanation you’re going to get:
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Alicia Wanless and I welcomed the estimable Darcie Draudt, an expert in politics on the Korean Peninsula, to tell us about those North Korean soldiers in Ukraine. What are they doing there? What does their presence tell us about North Korea’s international posture?
What is my shirt a metaphor for today? All these questions and more, answered only on #DogShirtTV:
Today On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett
Trump’s Military Purge Spells Trouble for Democracy and Defense
Lindsay Cohn explains how President Donald Trump’s recent firing of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown Jr. and other military leaders—including the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force—makes the military a less effective fighting force and signals the administration’s desire to eliminate resistance to potential actions, such as using the military to suppress civilian demonstrations:
Removing top military leaders either for faithfully implementing the policies of previous administrations or for their identity—rather than for incompetence or failing to perform their duties—is a move designed to consolidate and retain regime power. Removing the top uniformed lawyers simultaneously and without justification presages an intent to act in ways that truly independent lawyers might advise against. Together, these measures constitute a crisis.
The German Election and the Future of U.S.-European Relations
In the latest installment of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Moritz Graefrath discusses the German election and incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s pledge to “strengthen Europe” and ultimately “achieve independence” from the United States. Graefrath observes that Merz will have to overcome strong domestic political opposition and longstanding German aversion to rearmament in order to fulfill his promise:
Merz’s comments echo the previous government’s announcement of a Zeitenwende—the promise made after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to fundamentally rethink German defense policy and embrace the need for greater military spending. But observers hoping that the new government will realize this policy revision should not jump to optimistic conclusions.
Filling the Security Void of the Budapest Memorandum
Mykhailo Soldatenko argues that a ceasefire or other agreement to end the Russia-Ukraine war must include dependable security provisions that will remedy the gap left by the Budapest Memorandum. Soldatenko discusses the terms of the 1994 agreement, in which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for commitments from the U.S., United Kingdom, and Russia that they ultimately did not uphold:
Today, Ukraine points to the failure of the bargain—nukes for security—which was compromised when Russia’s aggression began in 2014, followed by its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. To remedy this breach of the agreement, Ukraine calls for a reliable security substitute—especially considering its currently clear-cut legal right to withdraw from the NPT and acquire nuclear weapons. In response, Russia and some Western scholars have downplayed the Budapest Memorandum’s importance and related Ukrainian claims. Considering its relevance to forthcoming negotiations, it is crucial to distinguish facts from myths about this controversial agreement.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Scott R. Anderson sits down with Kathleen Claussen and Peter E. Harrell to discuss the ambitious set of tariffs the Trump administration has imposed so far. They talk about what other tariffs seem to be coming over the horizon and how they all line up with the legal authorities Trump is using to impose them:
Videos
Today at 4 p.m. ET, I will speak to Anna Bower, Chris Mirasola, and Roger Parloff about the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the birthright citizenship executive order, detaining immigrants at Guantanamo Bay, and the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the firing of probationary employees:
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is a caiman with a crown of butterflies:
Butterflies and bees sometimes hang out near the eyes of local reptiles because reptile tears are a reliable source of salt when the mineral is otherwise scarce.
In honor of today’s Beast, as the caiman’s tears bring life to the butterflies, let your tears bring life something or someone—and look as smugly cheerful about it as the caiman. .
In my “The Situation” column, I wrote about Dan Bongino, a man so talented he can be both a mega-podcaster and and the deputy director of the FBI:
The Situation on Monday introduced Lawfare’s new narrative podcast series, which has made it to number 67 on the Apple Podcasts chart in news.
Which is to say that it is only 60 places behind the podcast of the FBI’s new deputy director, Dan Bongino—which is currently in seventh place.
I confess that I have a certain envy of Bongino today, and it’s not just because Escalation still has a lot of climbing to do before it overtakes the Dan Bongino Show in the rankings. It’s also because I think that among podcasters qualified for senior FBI positions, I actually should be higher on the list than he is. Sure, sure, Bongino was a Secret Service agent, and a New York cop, and I have never worked in law enforcement at all. And I know that being a podcaster isn’t really a qualification at all to run complex investigations and manage a 35,000 person agency.
But hey, the day-in-day-out content of the Lawfare Podcast is far more germane on average to the FBI’s day-to-day business than is the average episode of the Dan Bongino Show (unless, that is, you consider MAGA politicking to be rightfully the FBI’s business—which Donald Trump clearly does). And while both Bongino and I are underqualified for the position in the formal sense of, you know, ever having run a major law enforcement agency or component before, I at least know that I’m wildly unqualified for the job.
By contrast, I fear that neither the soon-to-be-former podcaster nor his soon-to-be-boss, Kash Patel, has the faintest idea that they are both cosplaying as leaders of the world’s preeminent investigative agency.
Think I’m exaggerating about the cosplaying bit? Read today’s Wall Street Journal, which reports—and I swear that I’m not making this up—that Patel announced in his first meeting with the field offices that he “was planning to . . . arrange a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the UFC cage-fighting league run by a close friend of President Trump’s.”
They don’t even know they’re cosplaying. It’s a little bit of a problem.
I also asked
to listen to his show, so you don’t have to, and write up some thoughts.The Dan Bongino Show
Today, I (
) listened to 42 minutes and 49 seconds of our incoming deputy FBI director’s 2024 Christmas podcast episode, which claims to be a compilation of Bongino’s best segments from the year.Here are my observations:
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