CNN  — 

In 2023, Dan Bongino, star podcaster, demanded to know: “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?”

In 2025, Dan Bongino, FBI deputy director, disappointed the 2023 version of himself.

“I have reviewed the case. Jeffrey Epstein killed himself,” he wrote Sunday in an X post. Bongino was flooded with replies, many of the accusatory variety, from people who refuse to believe him.

The backlash to Bongino’s factual statement is part of a broader political phenomenon. Some self-identified loyalists of President Trump are turning against Trump’s top law enforcement officials, partly because of the unsupported MAGA media claims that made those officials popular in the first place.

Conspiracy thinking has been a defining trait of the MAGA movement for as long as Trump has been a political candidate. Right-wing media personalities like Bongino, acting as Trump’s top attack dogs, routinely floated unproven theories as a way to malign Trump’s political opponents.

But now some of that conspiratorial talk has boomeranged back around. Listeners accustomed to “just asking questions” innuendo aren’t accepting the answers they’re getting.

Bongino’s contentious post on X came after he and his boss, FBI director Kash Patel, appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show. The choice of platform was telling: Bartiromo is a Trump zealot, her show is a regular promoter of pro-Trump conspiracy theories and is widely trusted by the president’s base.

Sunday’s telecast was billed as a long-awaited exclusive interview. Patel and Bongino blamed past FBI leaders for political bias and insisted that they are fixing what Trump fans believe is broken about the agency.

“You’re about to see a wave of transparency,” Patel said in response to Bartiromo’s pressure for “accountability” over the FBI’s now-infamous Trump-Russia probe.

But the two men also repeatedly tried to tamp down expectations about future revelations. And in a couple of cases they tried to deflate conspiratorial claims that have propped up and united Trump’s base.

Numerous MAGA media influencers have argued that the government is covering up information about last year’s Trump assassination attempts, for example. Bongino tried to let those people down easy. When Bartiromo asked about the cases, he let out a sigh, then emphasized that he had personally reviewed all the evidence.

“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth,” he said. “And whether you like it or not is up to you. If there was a big explosive ‘there’ there… we would have told you.”

Bongino, who used to host a show on Fox, seemed astutely aware of his audience during the interview. It is an audience that favors Fox’s hyperpartisan opinion shows over hard news coverage; an audience that eagerly shares social media memes about supposed liberal criminality and corruption.

“In Bongino’s case, his audience has been told for years that prominent liberals and deep-state operatives have committed blatant crimes against the Trump family that should be easy to prosecute,” Will Sommer of The Bulwark wrote last month. “Yet no top Democrats have been indicted, leading Trump fans to believe Bongino is falling down on the job.”

Bongino has repeatedly asked for patience in his social media posts. “Just because you don’t immediately see it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” he wrote in one such X post last month.

Some of his former viewers and listeners are deeply skeptical — of everything that conflicts with their preferred version of reality. Bartiromo alluded to that in the interview when she said to Patel, “You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. People don’t believe it.”

“Listen,” Patel said, “they have a right to their opinion,” but then he joined Bongino in trying to extinguish a conspiracy theory that has raged in right-wing media circles ever since Epstein died in 2019.

In his follow-up post on Sunday, Bongino told people, “I’m not asking you to believe me, or not. I’m telling you what exists, and what doesn’t. If new evidence surfaces I’m happy to reevaluate.”

Tommy Vietor, who served in the Obama administration and now co-hosts “Pod Save America,” wrote Sunday that it was “fascinating to watch Patel and Bongino transition from feeding the base lies and conspiracy theories to being in positions of actual responsibility and occasionally having to tell the truth.”

On topics like the January 6 attack, which stirred many far-right conspiracy theories that attempted to absolve Trump of blame, Patel said, “We’ve got answers coming.”

But as Bongino put it, when referring to the assassination attempts, “in some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for, is not there.”