Who Is Dan Bongino?

My VIP for this week is Dan Bongino, a radio talk-show host, podcaster, and former Secret Service agent. He testified before members of Congress this week and was asked for his opinion competence of the Secret Service after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was forced to resign after being questioned by Congress, and Ronald L. Rowe Jr. is now the interim director.

According to Tyler O’Neil at The Daily Signal, Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., asked Bongino, “Is the Secret Service in a better spot today with Director Rowe in charge?” 

“No, it’s worse,” Bongino replied. He predicted that “something else” will happen, although he added, “I pray to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that I’m wrong.”

“[If] you think this is the last incident, you’re out of your mind,” he said.

The former Secret Service agent said Rowe represents more of “the same people” in charge on July 13.

“Kim Cheatle, the director, wasn’t even fired. She was allowed to resign,” Bongino noted. “She’ll go get some cushy job somewhere, and her deputy” got promoted.

Bongino said whistleblowers within the Secret Service told him that Rowe “was concerned about the tie color of the agents on the detail because it seemed to imply they supported President Trump. This is the kind of stuff the Secret Service was actually wasting their time with.”

“If you can explain it, then good luck, because that’s not the agency I worked for,” he quipped….

Bongino spoke at a forum on the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump, responding to questions from five Republican members of Congress: Andy Biggs and Eli Crane of Arizona, Matt Gaetz and Cory Mills of Florida, and Chip Roy of Texas, Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and founder of the private military contractor Blackwater, and Ben Shaffer, a Washington regional SWAT operator who assisted in security on July 13, also answered the lawmakers’ questions….

Gaetz asked Bongino why it seems that Trump, “one of the most threatened people on the planet earth,” deals with “limited protection.”

Bongino emphasized that Secret Service “was definitely not a political enterprise” when he worked there.

Yet he suggested that politics likely played a motive in the Secret Service decreasing Trump’s protective detail.

“I absolutely believe Donald Trump and an enhanced security posture he should have had would have made him look more presidential, would have facilitated the logistical operation of him traveling,” Bongino said. “I think they were concerned about optics and making him look like a bigshot or whatever word you want to throw out there.”

“They are making some of these decisions based purely on grade school-level politics,” he lamented.

Gaetz indicated that he did not “want to believe that” about the Secret Service or the FBI. “We want to think of them as above [political capture].”