From the sounds of it, the FBI’s deputy director, Dan Bongino, is in a prison of his own making.

The former conservative podcast star, who took the job as the no. 2 G-man at the personal behest of President Trump, lamented to the co-hosts of “Fox & Friends” Thursday about the demands of what some ex-agents say is the hardest job in the FBI, and how it has taken a toll on his personal and family life.

Instead of sitting in a podcast studio, Mr. Bongino spends his days inside his office at the FBI’s brutalist J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., “staring at four walls” and plugging away from dawn to dusk.

“I gave up everything for this … my wife is struggling. It’s fine. I did this, and I’m proud I did it. But if you think we’re there for tea and crumpets, well, I mean, Kash [Patel] is there all day,” Mr. Bongino said, referring to the FBI director. “We share it. Our offices are late. He turns on the faucet. I hear it. He’s there … at like six o’clock in the morning. He doesn’t leave until seven at night. You know, I’m in there at 7:30 in the morning … he uses the gym. I work out in my apartment, but I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., you know, by myself, divorced from my wife, not divorced, but I mean separated, divorced, and it’s hard.”

Yet he insisted that he was not, like a former FBI director, Jim Comey, playing the “victim.”

Mr. Comey, who is despised by President Trump and his aides, on Wednesday appeared on CNN, where he said there was nothing in the backgrounds of Messrs. Bongino and Patel that made them qualified to manage an organization as complex as the FBI. 

“I’m sure it’s a huge adjustment to go from being a podcaster to being the deputy director of the FBI,” he joked about Mr. Bongino.

Mr. Bongino’s style is certainly different than Mr. Comey’s imperious style. Mr. Bongino regularly uses his official FBI account on X to post lengthy updates, many of them bordering on koans, on recent FBI developments and arrests, often signing off with: “It’s a bad day to be a bad guy  in America.” In many of his posts, he defends both himself and Mr. Patel for their professional obligation to exercise restraint rather than disclosing sensational details about high-interest cases like Jeffrey Epstein’s death and the baggy of cocaine left in the Biden White House in 2023.

 “The Dan Bongino Show,” Mr. Bongino’s eponymous podcast, was hugely successful, drawing tens of millions of listens and downloads per month.  

Traditionally, the deputy director serves as a ballast to the FBI director, where the former’s intimate knowledge of the bureau balances the worst impulses and relative inexperience of the latter. But both Messrs. Patel and Bongino were total outsiders, something that was, at first, a concern among politicians and former agents.  

Now, though, it seems serving as Mr. Patel’s top deputy has left Mr. Bongino feeling like a caged lion, eager to talk about the high-profile cases that made him millions of dollars as a media entrepreneur.