Conservative pundit, author, and entrepreneur Dan Bongino, who spent 12 years as a Secret Service agent, called for the agency’s current director to immediately step down following the near-assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Describing the attack at a Saturday rally in Butler, Pa., an “apocalyptic security failure,” Bongino, who once served on the protective details of then-Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama after a stint as an instructor at the Secret Service Training Academy in Maryland, was responding to a statement the agency put out claiming officials “added protective resources & technology & capabilities as part of the increased campaign travel tempo.”
He went on to slam his old employer for refusing to take responsibility for the incident, which left Trump exposed after a series of prior discoveries by bystanders, local police, and Service agents on the scene that should have led to some sort of intervention against the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks.
“This is the best technology we have’? Really? To let a sniper 150 yards away from the potential next president shoot a piece of his ear off?” Bongino told Fox News. “Kimberly Cheatle has failed Donald Trump, and honestly failed Joe Biden too.”
He also said that agency counter-sniper teams failed to engage Crooks before he was able to squeeze off several shots.
“We’re trained out to 1,000 yards in the Secret Service with the counter-sniper team. How did they miss someone at most one-fifth of the way there? It doesn’t make any sense. And even worse, it’s broad daylight on a white roof,” Bongino added.
The Secret Service has strongly denied reports that Trump’s security detail requested reinforcements and were denied. However, Bongino asserts that he can prove otherwise. “I can tell you actual quotes,” he said on Sunday.
“I can tell you, and absolutely confirm, from the horse’s mouth, from multiple people … there have been repeated requests to increase the security footprint, around not just the residences of Donald Trump, but the body itself,” the former Secret Service agent said. “And they have been rebuffed.”
Bongino summarized the incident as his interview wrapped up: “Never forget, an uneventful failure is never a success, and the fact that Donald Trump didn’t die yesterday is no reason for anybody to take some kind of victory lap,” he said.
After the federal protection agency claimed that local police were required to secure the building and rooftop used by Crooks, the head of the Fraternal Order of Police ripped into the U.S. Secret Service.
The group’s president, Patrick Yoes, also said that the federal agency’s primary function is to protect Trump wherever he is.
Yoes made his remarks after the agency’s director, Kimberly Cheatle, doubled down on her agency’s claim that local police were supposed to secure that building.
“All of us want answers,” Yoes said in a statement, noting remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that the failure in security nearly resulted in Trump losing his life. “All of us in law enforcement can agree that the roof of the building should have been secured by law enforcement. It clearly was not.”
Fox News adds:
The Secret Service has come under fire after it was revealed the alleged shooter was able to obtain an elevated shooting position just outside the security perimeter of the rally. Yoes noted that the agency relies on the support and assistance of local authorities for such events.
“Suggestions made in the media that suggest local agencies should play no role in assisting the USSS at events like that one in Butler simply do not know what they are talking about,” he said.
Yoes said the Secret Service will begin relying more on local police agencies as the election nears.
“Yet, in the wake of some of the anonymous comments from unknown officials, State and local agencies may wonder if they can rely on the Secret Service,” he said. “I am concerned that anonymous statements or media speculation could have a chilling effect on the ability of Federal, State and local law enforcement to work together through what will certainly be a grueling campaign.”
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