Attorney General Pam Bondi and the FBI director, Kash Patel, have named Missouri’s combative attorney general, Andrew Bailey, as FBI co-deputy director, alongside the current deputy director, Daniel Bongino, just weeks after a contentious White House meeting about Jeffrey Epstein that nearly caused the former podcaster to quit. Ms. Bondi made the announcement of Mr. Bailey’s appointment on Monday evening.

The decision to name Mr. Bailey — who earned a national reputation in recent years for aggressively challenging DEI initiatives and supporting St. Louis’s embattled police force — was made by the White House, a person familiar with the FBI’s decision told The New York Sun. 

In a statement to Fox News, which was the first to Mr. Bailey’s appointment, Ms. Bondi said she was “thrilled” to add the Iraq War veteran as co-deputy director. 

“He has served as a distinguished state attorney general and is a decorated war veteran, bringing expertise and dedication to service,” Ms. Bondi said. 

Like Mr. Bongino before him, Mr. Bailey is taking one of the FBI’s most demanding of senior positions with no prior experience in the storied law enforcement agency. Prior deputy directors like John S. Pistole and Weldon L. Kennedy came to the role with at least two decades of FBI experience under their belts.

The role of deputy director itself is to serve as a counterweight to the FBI director, where the former’s intimate knowledge of the bureau balances the worst impulses and relative inexperience of the latter. Unlike the FBI director, the deputy director’s job does not require Senate confirmation and is not usually a presidential appointment.

In February, Mr. Bongino left his lucrative and hugely influential podcast, the “Dan Bongino Show,” to work alongside Mr. Patel “to re-establish faith in this institution,” as he said at the time, 

But Mr. Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and NYPD cop, soon appeared defeated by his new role, telling “Fox & Friends” in May that he spent his days “staring at four walls” and plugging away at his desk inside the brutalist J. Edgar Hoover Building at Washington. 

“I gave up everything for this … my wife is struggling. It’s fine. I did this, and I’m proud I did it,” Mr. Bongino said, adding that he wasn’t working at the FBI “for tea and crumpets.” 

Yet it was the Department of Justice’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein — whose 2019 jailhouse death was once invaluable fodder for Mr. Bongino’s podcast — that would bring both Ms. Bondi and the FBI a firestorm of criticism from the MAGA world.

Tensions erupted in July after the justice department ruled Epstein’s death a suicide and denied the existence of a “client list” that Ms. Bondi herself once insinuated she had on her desk. Ms. Bondi confronted Mr. Bongino over a NewsNation article in which a source close to the White House claimed the FBI would have “released every single piece of evidence they could, while protecting victims, months ago” if it had the power to operate independently from the DOJ. Mr. Bongino denied leaking the information, and reportedly left the meeting in a huff, refusing to show up for work the following day and sparking speculation that he would resign.

On X, Mr. Bongino reposted news of Mr. Bailey’s new role, writing “Welcome” with three American flags emojis. 

“The FBI, as the leading investigative body of the federal government under the Department of Justice, will always bring the greatest talent this country has to offer in order to accomplish the goals set forth when an overwhelming majority of American people elected President Donald J. Trump again,” Mr. Patel said in a statement to Fox News. 

Mr. Bailey said he would resign from his role as attorney general of Missouri on September 8. A decorated Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq, Mr. Bailey was named attorney general in Missouri in 2023. During his brief yet notable tenure in office, Mr. Bailey imposed emergency rules restricting gender-affirming care for transgender minors because transgender transition interventions are “experimental,” his office said in 2023.

He also helped force a St. Louis Circuit attorney, Kim Gardner, out of office for what his office said were her failures to prosecute violent crime at St. Louis. In July, Mr. Bailey secured a grand jury felony indictment against the St. Louis County executive, Sam Page, for misuse of public funds and for violating election law.

“My life has been defined by a call to service, and I am once again answering that call, this time at the national level. But wherever I am called, Missouri is and always will be home,” Mr. Bailey said in a statement on Monday.

He will be leaving his role in Missouri less than a year after he was elected to a full term. Mr. Bailey, who’d been appointed to the job in 2022 after his predecessor in the job, Eric Schmitt, won a U.S. Senate seat, narrowly beat back a primary challenge from the right a year ago. The challenger he defeated, Will Scharf, is now Mr. Trump’s staff secretary, a powerful White House official who manages the stream of paperwork in and out of the Oval Office.

Mr. Bongino will not be leaving the FBI in light of Mr. Bailey’s appointment, a person close to the FBI tells the Sun.