JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The current leaders of the FBI have spent years entertaining conspiracy theories and building suspicions about the agency they now run. Deputy Director Dan Bongino in particular openly disputed official reports that sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide. Here he is on his former show two years ago.
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DAN BONGINO: Listen - that Jeffrey Epstein story is a big deal. Please do not let that story go. Keep your eye on this.
SUMMERS: But last week, Bongino's tune changed.
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BONGINO: I've seen the whole file. He killed himself.
SUMMERS: That's from an interview he and FBI Director Kash Patel did with Fox Business. Bongino's reversal on Epstein stunned many observers, but as NPR's Lisa Hagen reports, what happened next tells us more about how conspiracy-minded communities are making sense of Trump's second term.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: There's been skepticism about Epstein's 2019 suicide across the political spectrum. But on the right, Epstein's story has been used to advance narratives about what often gets called the deep state. That's the conspiracist idea that there are entrenched government officials working to undermine President Trump. So there was some snickering and disbelief after Bongino insisted that Epstein really did kill himself, including from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
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TUCKER CARLSON: I love Bongino. He's a friend of mine. But you weren't convinced by that?
SHAWN RYAN: (Laughter) No.
HAGEN: Carlson's guest was podcaster Shawn Ryan. As for Patel, before Trump picked him to run the FBI, he said it should be easy for the agency to release a list of Epstein's associates. Here he is with podcaster Benny Johnson in 2023.
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KASH PATEL: Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.
HAGEN: But after their recent interview, rather than collectively turning on Patel and Bongino, many in the conspiracist or pro-Trump media actually just began to speculate about what was really going on. Here are podcasters Patrick Bet-David and Ashley Epp.
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PATRICK BET-DAVID: There's a part of me that believes Trump is behind all of this because Trump wants to use this as a leverage of negotiating against the enemy.
ASHLEY EPP: And there was a pregnant pause before he said, the victims and the victim identity. I think they're protecting an ongoing investigation.
HAGEN: Mike Rothschild is a journalist and author who focuses on conspiracy theories, and he says in moments like this, after the initial burst of anger...
MIKE ROTHSCHILD: Then the really, sort of, pretzel-like defenses start, of having to justify why there's a bigger reason why these guys said something.
HAGEN: Rothschild says this mental process is actually where QAnon conspiracy theories came from during Trump's first term. He says Q followers believed a heroic Trump was going to lead a storm of arrests and executions of high-profile figures for their involvement in supposed Satanic pedophile cabals.
ROTHSCHILD: QAnon emerged as a way to explain, well, it's happening, it's just happening in secret. And we have to do it in a way that the normies can't figure out and push back against.
HAGEN: After Bongino and Patel spoke to Fox, there were QAnon-promoting show hosts who were clearly frustrated. But even there, you could see this other tendency playing out. Here's one host who goes by the pseudonym Shipwreck.
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SHIPWRECK: I want better answers than we've been getting. I want what we were promised. And if you can't give us what we were promised, then why did you promise it to us in the first place?
HAGEN: She's enraged, but in the comments, her audience is already saying it makes sense to them that the FBI officials had to say that because, actually, Epstein is still alive or the big arrests are still coming. Another person posts, maybe it's just a test of faith. Here's Rothschild.
ROTHSCHILD: There's always something that turns a disconfirmation into a confirmation.
HAGEN: Epstein's death, QAnon and the deep state are, of course, not the only conspiracy theories that have helped elevate Trump and his officials. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. built a following promoting the disproven theory that measles vaccines cause autism. Rothschild says that when RFK Jr. endorsed the MMR vaccine last month...
ROTHSCHILD: A lot of the big anti-vax figures were openly tweeting, like, how could you say this? You know, we voted for Trump to get Big Pharma out of politics. And, like, days later, he was back, saying, well, you know, the vaccine's not really effective. I don't really recommend it.
HAGEN: He says that officials who've helped boost conspiracy theories are likely to continue to face uncomfortable moments as they try to govern. Some may even fall out of favor with their former followers. But the beliefs themselves aren't going anywhere. As for releasing more on Epstein's death, Bongino was back on Fox Thursday, promising, quote, "disclosure on this coming shortly."
Lisa Hagen, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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