The FBI is reopening—and growing—a series of investigations that have stirred outrage among Republicans and MAGA figures.
Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, said the agency is doubling its efforts to examine “potential public corruption” by relaunching probes into the 2023 discovery of cocaine in Joe Biden’s White House, the still-unsolved 2021 D.C. pipe bomb case and the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson opinion, which ultimately led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“We made the decision to either reopen or push additional resources and investigative attention to these cases,” Bongino posted on X Monday. “I receive requested briefings on these cases weekly, and we are making progress.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The move arrives shortly after the FBI faced backlash from MAGA figures for not exposing any “deep state” cover-ups or confirming conspiracy theories—including ones surrounding the death by suicide of billionaire child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—even though the agency is now headed by Donald Trump loyalists Bongino and Director Kash Patel.
Each investigation mentioned by the FBI’s No. 2 official has, at one point, been a major talking point on the right.
The discovery of a bag of cocaine in a vestibule of the White House in July 2023 provided MAGA figures with days of talking points—not just to attack former President Biden, but also his son Hunter, who has publicly struggled with drug addiction. Several tried to suggest the cocaine belonged to Hunter Biden, despite no Biden family members being present at the White House that day.
The Secret Service closed its investigation on July 12, citing the lack of fingerprint or DNA evidence meant they could not “single out a person of interest from the hundreds of individuals” who passed through the area, where visitors leave their phones and other belongings, on the day the cocaine was found.
Bongino, a former MAGA podcaster, had previously claimed, without offering evidence, that whistleblowers told him they were “suspicious” that fingerprints taken from the bag could match someone in “the inner Biden circle,” Reuters reported.
The FBI is also digging into the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion. The draft was published by Politico in May 2022, sparking nationwide protests and political backlash.
The Supreme Court launched an internal investigation, calling it “one of the worst breaches of trust in its history,” but failed to identify the leaker.
Trump expressed frustration that the case remains unsolved. In a January 2023 Truth Social post, he wrote that it won’t be long before “the name of this slime is revealed.”
And the FBI is also pushing to solve the case of a suspect who placed two pipe bombs near the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., on January 5, 2021, the eve of the MAGA protests supporting Trump‘s false 2020 election fraud claims and subsequent riot at the Capitol.
More than four years later, no one has been arrested in connection with the bombs, which were defused, despite substantial video evidence tracking the suspect’s movements through the Capitol Hill area that night.
Trump has repeatedly questioned why no arrests have been made, pushing the unfounded theory that left-wing protesters could have planted the bombs to incite violence and frame Trump supporters.
