FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey is quitting after just one year on the job, he announced on social media Monday.
As FBI Director Kash Patel’s right-hand man, Bailey oversaw the highly politicized raid on the Fulton County, Georgia, elections department this year but otherwise maintained a low profile at the bureau.
Posting from his personal account on X, Bailey said he was “stepping down to return to my family in Missouri.”
“I am confident Director Patel will continue to reform the FBI, combat violent crime, defend the homeland, ensure strong organizational accountability, and restore public trust in this institution of excellence,” he wrote.
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Bailey’s departure comes as the FBI has drawn criticism for prioritizing criminal investigations against President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, ex-CIA Director John Brennan and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Patel has taken heat from congressional Democrats over those decisions — as well as the way the bureau has fired dozens of experienced agents who were viewed internally as disloyal to Trump.
Although the FBI director is the face of the country’s leading law enforcement agency, it’s the deputy director who has traditionally handled much of the bureau’s actual day-to-day operations — which is why that role is typically filled by a career special agent who is intimately familiar with the investigative processes and knows how to navigate an institution that is large, secretive and bureaucratic.
However, Bailey’s appointment marked yet another sharp departure from tradition for the second Trump administration. Until he joined the FBI last year, he was known for his willingness to take on culture war issues as Missouri’s Republican attorney general: fighting President Joe Biden’s student loan program, blocking transgender medical care for youths and targeting journalists at the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters.
And he came on board as a co-deputy director — another anomaly — to support Trump’s first pick as deputy director: Dan Bongino, a conservative podcaster who’d spent more than a decade as a Secret Service agent but hadn’t previously worked at the FBI.
Bailey drew little public attention during his year at the bureau, except for his decision to oversee the January FBI raid of the Fulton County election headquarters — a government attempt to breathe life into Trump’s widely disproven claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
In June, Bailey discussed the FBI’s focus on breaking apart what he called “industrial-scale scam compounds” during a trip to Thailand. The following month, he traveled to Argentina, seeking to develop more international cooperation in targeting organized crime.
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