FBI co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey, who joined the FBI in the newly created position in September 2025 to work alongside then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino, is stepping down, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Page A4From§Eachthe noon edition — 28 September 2026
FBI director needed a cheat sheet for the Senate; his own three-person team lost a third.
As it ran on the front
Andrew Bailey resigned this week as one of the FBI's co-deputy directors, a position that did not exist until September 2025, when Kash Patel created it and placed Bailey in it alongside Dan Bongino. Bailey told colleagues on a Monday that he was leaving to spend more time with his family. He had held the job a little more than a year.
For that year, the bureau ran with three names at the top instead of the usual director and deputy: Patel, Bailey, and Bongino, sharing a title neither co-deputy had held before, because it had never existed before. Bailey came to it from the Missouri attorney general's office, an elected post he held as a Republican and an ally of President Trump. That was the résumé. The job itself was new, and one-third of it is now empty.…
…(cont) In that same hearing, on camera, he clashed with Senator Peter Welch of Vermont over allegations about his own conduct. The director needed notes to get through one senator. Thirteen days later, he was down a deputy.
What happens to the co-deputy arrangement now — whether Bongino holds the title alone, whether Patel names a third person, or whether the bureau simply reverts to how it ran before September 2025 — is not yet in the record. What is in the record is smaller and plainer: a director who needed a cheat sheet to answer the Senate spent that same month watching the leadership structure he built come apart at the one-year mark.
The bar math is short. One new title, twelve months, one hearing where the director studied for a senator instead of answering one, one resignation citing family time. Whatever the three-person structure was supposed to prove, it held together for exactly as long as it took Patel to sit for a single round of questions he needed a cheat sheet to survive.
“One year, three names at the top, and the newest hire is already the first one gone — right after the director needed a cheat sheet just to answer Dick Durbin. Congress asks a question, Patel reads from notes; a year passes, one of his own deputies is out the door. Watch what happens to oversight when the man who needed a study guide for the Senate is still the one running the building.”
“Bailey said family reasons, so that's the story — people leave jobs for their kids all the time, nothing here. And the notes for Durbin were a briefing document, not a — did I say cheat sheet? That's not what I meant, every senator gets prepped for, this is just normal hearing prep.”
The receipts
FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey is leaving the bureau roughly one year after joining Director Kash Patel’s leadership team, a source familiar with the matter confirmed. Bailey, a former Republican attorney general of Missouri and an ally of President Donald Trump, told colleagues Monday that he was departing to spend more time with…
Mr. Bailey, who was part of a three-person leadership team atop the bureau, lasted barely a year.
· FBI Director Patel clashes with lawmakers during Senate Judiciary hearing from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Pictured: Patel brings cheat sheet for sparring with Dick Durbin during FBI oversight hearing from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Kash Patel to testify before Congress next week from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.