NBC’s Lester Holt stepping down; another Fox News personality joins Trump’s government

Lester Holt is stepping down as the anchor of NBC Nightly News, though he’s not disappearing entirely from your television.

Holt, who has anchored NBC’s nightly news program for a decade, announced to staffers Monday he would be stepping away from the role early this summer.

“It has truly been the honor of a lifetime to work with each of you every day, keeping journalism as our true north and our viewers at the center of everything we do,” Holt said in a memo to employees.

While he will be giving up the network’s top news chair, Holt will continue to anchor Dateline NBC, a show he has hosted for 14 years, in an expanded role.

“I’m excited to report I will be continuing as anchor of ‘Dateline NBC,’ but for the first time in a full time capacity whereby I will be expanding my footprint on the broadcast and crafting ‘Dateline’ hours on subjects I care deeply about,” Holt wrote.

Holt has been the main anchor of NBC Nightly News since June 2015, when he brought stability after former anchor Brian Williams was suspended and ultimately reassigned for “misrepresented events which occurred while he was covering the Iraq War in 2003,” according to the network.

Holt “has led the network during some of the country’s most fraught and challenging times in the past decade,” Janelle Rodriguez, executive vice president of programming for NBC News, wrote in a message to staff. “Quite simply, Lester is the beating heart of this news organization.”

Holt joined NBC News in 2000. Prior to that, he spent 19 years with CBS as a reporter, a stint that included 14 years anchoring the evening news on WBBM-TV in Chicago.

NBC has not yet named a replacement.

President Donald Trump appointed popular conservative podcaster and radio host Dan Bongino as FBI deputy director Sunday night, the latest former Fox News personality to join his administration.

Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and one of Trump’s most outspoken supporters, will report to newly confirmed FBI director Kash Patel, himself a Trump loyalist. Like Patel, Bongino has never served in the FBI, which raises questions how the administration plans to run an agency responsible for investigating violent crimes and protecting the country from domestic terror threats.

Bongino is at least the 20th former or current Fox News personality who has joined the Trump administration, though Bongino’s tenure at the network was short. He served as a Fox News contributor for two years before landing his own weekend show, which also lasted for two years before it was upended by failed contract negotiations.

Other Fox News personalities serving in the Trump administration include transportation secretary Sean Duffy, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, who was hired as a Fox contributor in 2022.

The pipeline moves in the opposite direction as well. Fox News hired Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, to host a weekend show called My View with Lara Trump. The first episode premiered Saturday night, and not surprisingly it featured pro-Trump interviews with Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.