FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey to Step Down After Year in Shared Role
FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey announced on Monday, Sept. 28, that he will step down after about a year in the job. Guardian His time as one of the bureau's two No. 2 leaders started with a rare job-share and included work on sensitive investigations tied to elections.
Bailey shared the decision in a post on his @AndrewBaileyMO X account, saying he would return to his family in Missouri. Bailey statement on X He thanked FBI Director Kash Patel, Donald Trump and Attorney General Todd Blanche. He said historic results were delivered in the mission to Make America Safe Again under President Trump's leadership. He added that he trusts Patel will continue to reform the FBI, fight violent crime, defend the homeland, enforce accountability in the organization, and restore public trust.
Bailey is a former attorney general of Missouri. He began as co-deputy director alongside Dan Bongino in September 2025. He had resigned as Missouri attorney general effective Sept. 8 to take the federal post. Bongino left the FBI in January. After that, Bailey served alongside Christopher Raia, a former FBI special agent and New York field office official.
At the bureau, Bailey oversaw election-related investigations, including one involving 2020 ballots in Georgia. In January, he was present when FBI agents executed a search warrant at an election office in Fulton County and seized ballots and other materials from the 2020 presidential election. A search warrant is written permission from a judge to search a place and take items as possible evidence.
To understand why his presence mattered, it helps to know normal practice. Senior headquarters officials usually keep distance from seizures in politically charged cases in the field. Having a top leader on site for a seizure tied to an election decided more than five years earlier broke with that norm.
MS Now first reported the resignation. When asked for comment, the FBI referred the Guardian to Bailey's social media post. Patel later publicly thanked Bailey for his dedicated service.
The New York Times reported that Bailey and Raia had a contentious relationship with Patel and went long stretches without speaking to each other. New York Times
For readers trying to weigh those two accounts, both can be accurate in narrow ways. Public farewell statements rarely discuss internal disagreement. Unattributed descriptions of estrangement are also hard to measure.
The broader context here is structural and practical. The co-deputy model splits authority that normally runs through a single deputy, much like two managers sharing one office. That creates parallel channels to the director and can blur responsibility when priorities differ. Two changes at that level within nine months, Bongino's exit in January and now Bailey's announced departure, shorten the institutional memory available for ongoing matters. Election-related investigations require strict rules for chain-of-custody, which is the documented trail of who handled evidence, for predication, which is the legal basis for investigating, and for records. Any handover at the supervisory level will need to preserve those standards under intense outside scrutiny.
Looking at what this means for the bureau, the wording in Bailey's statement deserves close attention. Reform, violent crime, homeland defense, accountability and public trust are separate jobs that compete for staff and attention. His expression of confidence in Patel frames the departure as orderly succession rather than rupture. The reported periods without communication, if accurate, would point to a different working reality. What comes next will turn more on personnel than on statements. Who Patel selects to serve alongside or succeed Raia, how that official defines the scope of the Georgia-related inquiry, and whether headquarters keeps a visible role in field operations will shape views of the bureau's direction more than farewell words.
