Bailey was originally brought in to help ease tensions between former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.
Page A5From§Eachthe matinee edition — 28 September 2026
Referee hired to ease the Bondi-Bongino feud resigns; the man who needed cue cards remains director.
As it ran on the front
Andrew Bailey resigned this week as one of the FBI's two co-deputy directors, a title that did not exist until September 2025, when Director Kash Patel split the deputy's job in two and gave one half to Bailey and the other to Dan Bongino. CBS News reported this week that the position was created to ease tension between Bondi and Bongino — a diagnosis CBS's reporting reached, not a statement the bureau itself put out. Whatever kept the peace, it ran through a title that had not existed at the bureau before Bailey held it.
On September 15, he did, and the hearing turned into a public clash with Dick Durbin and the rest of the committee; the Washington Examiner published a photograph of Patel holding a cheat sheet, notes to get him through the questions.…
…(cont) Two weeks before Patel needed those notes, on September 1, the Washington Examiner reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll had resigned, one more senior official pushed out during Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's tenure. The resignation letter had gone to the White House the day before, and the White House had not yet said whether it would accept it. Bailey's exit is not the administration's only senior departure this month; it is the same pattern surfacing in a different building.
Bailey held the co-deputy job a little over a year. The New York Post reported that he had also overseen the bureau's 2020 election integrity probe, and that a source familiar with his exit said he had struggled with being far from his family in Missouri. Six years earlier, on November 17, 2020, the same president fired Chris Krebs, the CISA director who had called that election "the most secure in American history," and forced his own deputy, who had expected to become acting director, to resign along with him. The 2020 election has now cost the jobs of two federal officials who worked on it, under the same president, six years apart.
The FBI's leadership team was built to run on three names instead of the usual two. It is down to two again.
“They built a whole extra chair at the FBI just to keep two guys from tearing into each other, and now the guy in the chair is the one who's gone. Same stretch of days the Army's top civilian walks out under Hegseth, and Patel's up on the Hill needing flash cards to get through his own oversight hearing. Watch who actually worked the 2020 election file — Krebs got fired over it in 2020, and six years later, same president, another one's clearing his desk.”
“A guy misses his family in Missouri, that's not a scandal, that's a Tuesday — people go home in every administration. And the notes, come on, every witness preps for a hearing, that's just standard — wait, is that not the line I'm supposed to run? Bottom line, the bureau's fine, it's just going through some restructuring. Did I say restructuring? That's not even the word they used.”
Earlier in this story
- FBI director needed a cheat sheet for the Senate; his own three-person team lost a third. By Sal · the noon edition, 28 September 2026
The receipts
Mr. Bailey, who was part of a three-person leadership team atop the bureau, lasted barely a year.
A source familiar with the co-deputy director's exit said that Bailey had difficulty settling in at the bureau and had struggled with being so distant from his family in Missouri.
· Driscoll’s resignation further intensifies questions surrounding Hegseth from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submits resignation to Trump from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· President Donald Trump fires Chris Krebs, the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversaw the security of the 2020 election. Deputy Director Matthew Travis, from the morgue, 17 Nov 2020
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.