After a year in Trump admin, Dan Bongino returns to Fox News to cover Nancy Guthrie case

Former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino has returned to Fox News after announcing his departure from the bureau in December, after less than a year in the role.

Bongino, 51, an ex-Secret Service agent turned conservative podcaster prior to joining President Donald Trump’s administration, previously appeared regularly on Fox as a guest contributor and as the host of Unfiltered with Dan Bongino between 2021 and 2023.

He made his first appearance since departing the FBI Monday evening on Sean Hannity’s primetime show to discuss the apparent kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, mother of NBC News anchor Savannah Guthrie, who disappeared from her home in Tucson, Arizona, on January 31.

A reported ransom deadline in the case of the missing 84-year-old, whom law enforcement believes was taken against her will, has now passed and there have been no subsequent updates about the victim’s health or whereabouts.

“We believe our mom is still out there,” the Today show host said in her latest Instagram video. “We need your help.”

The FBI, meanwhile, has said that they have no contact with the alleged kidnappers.

“The FBI is not aware of any continued communication between the Guthrie family and suspected kidnappers, nor have we identified a suspect or person of interest in this case at this time. Additional personnel from FBI field offices across the nation continue to deploy to Tucson,” the agency said in a statement on Monday.

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Discussing the Guthrie mystery with Hannity, Bongino said: “I see three possibilities. The first is that this was obviously a kidnapping – an intended kidnapping for a ransom payment.

“The second possibility is that this was just a crime that went awry. Someone was at the house, maybe it was a burglary, something went bad, and you have some bad actors committing another crime by requesting a ransom for something they didn’t do, just to take advantage of a situation like this.

“The third possibility is that there may have been some kind of medical emergency or something, and maybe this was not a kidnapping. When you can’t find someone in a crime scene like this right away, within the first couple of days, you either have really good, surgical-type operators, or the story you’ve been told – or believed – might not be the story.”

Bongino appeared not to enjoy his time with the FBI, complaining during an appearance on Fox and Friends last May about the toll the job's demands were taking on him and his family.

“I gave up everything for this,” he told the network’s breakfast show. “I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife – not divorced, but I mean separated, divorced – and it’s hard. I mean, we love each other, and it’s hard to be apart.

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“People ask me all the time, ‘Do you like it?’ I say, ‘No, I don’t.’”

His situation did not improve after the Department of Justice and the FBI put out a memo last July declaring that there was no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison in 2019 and that the disgraced financier had left behind no “client list” incriminating his powerful friends.

Instead of killing off the many conspiracy theories surrounding the Epstein case – some of which FBI Director Kash Patel and Bongino himself had stoked and entertained in their previous lives as podcasters – the memo only served to pour gasoline on the fire, ultimately leading to the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act through Congress and the subsequent release of the government’s documents.

Patel and Bongino, meanwhile, found themselves under attack from the MAGA-aligned communities in which they had once been central players.

When his departure from the bureau was announced last year, Fox anchor Laura Ingraham expressed little surprise, telling her viewers that he “loved his lucrative media life” and wanted to “get back to it.”

Trump appears to hold no animosity towards Bongino over his departure, recently appearing as a guest on his revived Rumble podcast and making headlines by suggesting Republicans should “nationalize” the voting process during elections in order stop “crooked” blue states from allowing illegal immigrants to vote.