by Dan Bongino
Here’s a real-life example of the managerial risk avoidance I referenced within the Secret Service. When I was assigned to the transportation section of the Presidential Protective Division located in Secret Service headquarters, I was asked by my direct supervisor to attend a meeting with a representative from a security company. The company had developed a secure satellite technology applicable toward monitoring the whereabouts of President Bush when he was riding his bike (GPS technology wasn’t nearly as advanced at the time as it is currently). Although President Bush always rode with a peloton of staff, military, and Secret Service agents, he would at times veer far off course into the woods, and we would lose sight of him from the road when we were stationed in the motorcade. This was always a source of distress because if during those critical moments where we lost visual contact with the president from the cars, a Secret Service supervisor called out for his location on the radio, the agents in the cars wouldn’t have a specific answer, and every agent listening to the back-and-forth radio traffic knew it. During the opening moments of the meeting, the representative from the security company began to describe what I felt was an elegant solution to this problem using his company’s secure GPS technology. But not a few minutes into the presentation, the agent in charge of the division overseeing these types of acquisitions rudely interrupted him and shut down the meeting, saying the technology wouldn’t work. I was embarrassed for him. The security representative had hauled his butt out to our headquarters, and he had a perfectly viable technology, solving a vexing security problem for the Secret Service, and he wasn’t even allowed to finish his introduction before being shown the door.
This was not an isolated incident, as similar situations happened when I was assigned to the Secret Service training center operations section. I recall two companies that were looking to make their technology available to us, and also being preemptively shown the door. One company had a fire suppression chemical, which I thought was a good fit for the Secret Service advance teams working on overseas trips where the fire department was either nonexistent or ill prepared to handle a fire. The second product was a weapons system that allowed the operator to fire his weapon from around a corner, giving the operator a tremendous tactical advantage in a firefight. But neither of these products got a fair look because the company representatives never got past the e-mail and introduction stage. I saw this over and over again at the Secret Service, and it was events such as this that led the agents I worked with to mock the Secret Service’s fear of new technology by saying the motto of the agency should be “The Secret Service; yesterday’s technology, tomorrow.” But as we saw with the proactive Secret Service effort to work with both the private sector and the military on armor technology for the Secret Service vehicle fleet, the management is capable of evolving with the current threats when they perceive the threat as either immediate enough or catastrophic enough.
Walk into many technology company corporate headquarters and you’ll see pieces of their technological security puzzle, and their access-control mechanisms, putting the Secret Service’s technology to shame. These companies have an incentive to control access to their facilities to avoid the theft of their technology, and many of them will spare no expense on retinal scanning, fingerprint access systems, and other modern access-control technologies. But the Secret Service operates differently. Many of their critical-decision makers in management fear the impact on their careers if they propose a solution for a spectacular attack, such as a drone swarm strike, because that attack is unlikely to happen on their watch. And they refuse to burn an ounce of their internal career capital (which many intend to use on promotions and on relationships with the private sector they plan to join in retirement) on changing a security plan that hasn’t, in modern times, resulted in the loss of a president – yet.
But if the White House security plan doesn’t evolve, and doesn’t leverage technology to its advantage, then it will fail. It’s solely a matter of when. The Secret Service must regularly consult with an outside consortium of technology leaders, military operators, and industry security leaders to consult on both its use of technology, and on an upgrade of the airborne security blanket surrounding the White House. They must develop and continuously improve an impenetrable “air defense” prepared to handle an infiltration of tens, or hundreds, of drones at a time. Mass interception of the drone’s communications, along with physical interception of the drones, must be foolproof and immediate, and the detection technology for the drones must empower on-site Secret Service leadership at the White House to make immediate decisions on both interception and disruption. When an attack such as this happens, there isn’t going to be time to make multiple phone calls to Secret Service headquarters staff, or to PPD management, to defeat the drones. The PPD special agents and Uniformed Division officers on duty at the White House have to be empowered to train with, be able to operate, and immediately use the anti-drone technology or they will be quickly overrun like a school yard by a swarm of wasps.
8
TRUMP AND TWITTER: A BLESSING AND A CURSE
THE TRUMP PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN USED – and the Trump presidency continues to use – social media platforms such as Twitter in a manner never seen before in presidential politics. Although I’ve never run for the presidency, I have run for the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, and I’m familiar with the political consultant class and many of their robotic recommendations for candidates with regard to social media usage. Pre–Donald Trump, the generally accepted theory among the political consultants I spoke with regarding social media resembled the Hippocratic oath: “Do no harm.” In other words, use your social media accounts to post innocuous, nonconfrontational political messages targeted toward a specific voter demographic and, critically, avoid unnecessary social media fights at all costs. Many of the political consultants and campaign managers I know do not even allow their political clients access to their own social media accounts out of fear that they may “do harm.” The consultants insist on controlling the accounts as a preventative firewall in the event a candidate has an original thought and decides to post it to Twitter before focus-group testing the tweet. The Trump presidential campaign broke both of these “rules.” Trump frequently fought with his political opponents on Twitter, and the more prominent the opponent, the more likely he was to get a spirited response. In addition, Trump’s Twitter feed, although monitored by his campaign staff, clearly was his personal vehicle for many stream-of-consciousness tweets.
I have firsthand experience with Donald Trump and his creative use of Twitter because I was the subject of one of his tweets during the tail end of the 2016 presidential campaign. On August 9, 2016, I received a call from a booker at CNN asking me to appear that night on Don Lemon’s nightly program. I was knee-deep in my own campaign for Congress in Florida’s Nineteenth Congressional District at the time and was hesitant to agree to the appearance, but as is often the case with “gut feelings,” something told me to do it. The booker, due to my Secret Service background, wanted me to comment on statements Donald Trump had made with regard to Second Amendment supporters and Hillary Clinton, which some in the cable news, talking-head class, had disingenuously portrayed as a threat to Hillary. The appearance quickly degenerated into a slugfest between me and the host, Don Lemon, as I defended Trump’s comments, adding that in my professional opinion, this was nothing remotely resembling a threat. At one point, after being repeatedly talked over, I shouted at Lemon, “You don’t know crap, Don!” I said this because it is true; he doesn’t. Lemon was never a Secret Service agent, and he has zero experience in the threat-assessment arena. But I do. I was frustrated that he insisted on telling me how threat analysis worked, despite never having done it. This happens often with left-leaning media figures who outrageously assume that their faces on television anoint them with special insight into issues that actual experts don’t have. I’m not sure if Donald Trump was watching my appearance on CNN at the time, but he
either saw it or someone told him about it after the fact.
The next morning, a little after eleven o’clock, I glanced at the Twitter app on my mobile phone and noticed something odd: I had picked up a couple hundred new Twitter followers. Picking up a few hundred followers in a week was a social media milestone for me, so you can imagine my surprise to see a spike of a few hundred followers in just a few minutes. When I opened the app, I found out why the new burst of followers: Donald Trump had tweeted to me, thanking me for defending him on the CNN appearance. His tweet read, “@dbongino You were fantastic in defending both the Second Amendment and me last night on @CNN. Don Lemon is a lightweight – dumb as a rock.”1 I appreciated the gratitude, and by the end of the day, I had accumulated thousands of new Twitter followers. But not everyone appreciates the tweets of Donald Trump as I did. This is where the Secret Service enters the equation and must evolve to the changing social media environment.
The Secret Service has personnel assigned to their headquarters whose sole responsibility is to monitor and track presidential threats on the Internet and on social media platforms. When I joined the Secret Service in 1999, as e-mail was beginning to crowd out snail mail as the primary means of written communication, I remember conversing with protective intelligence agents and lamenting the fact that written presidential threats had just overcome a major obstacle: the stamp. The small obstacles of paying for a stamp and physically writing out a threat letter using a pen and paper were now eliminated, and anyone in front of a computer could e-mail a threat to the White House e-mail address. We all knew this was going to lead to an avalanche of new threats to be investigated. The explosive growth of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter eliminated yet another small obstacle to communicating a presidential threat: the need to search for a White House e-mail address. As I proposed in my 2013 book, Life Inside the Bubble, I believe these factors were the primary drivers for the growth in the number of reported threat cases directed at President Barack Obama. Many in the media attempted to link the growth in threat cases to racism against President Obama, but I didn’t notice any sudden surge in racism while I was on President Obama’s personal protection detail. I did, however, notice an explosion in social media usage while Obama was the president, and with that increased social media usage came the ability to threaten the president of the United States by simply tweeting to him, or tagging him on Facebook, a process that requires little effort. And based on the absurdity of some of the threats I read as a Secret Service agent, it doesn’t require serious intellectual capacity to type up an outrageous threat. This has caused the Secret Service innumerable headaches. They live in a zero-error environment where they cannot skip an investigation on a threat case, whether snail-mailed, e-mailed, tweeted, or Facebooked. But as a matter of simple logistics, they cannot possibly interview every person who takes advantage of social media to threaten the president.
Complicating matters for the Secret Service is President Trump’s personal use of Twitter. While I cannot conclusively show that President Trump is the person physically tapping the keyboard and pressing Send for each tweet on his account, the evidence suggests that he personally monitors and uses the account (Dan Scavino Jr., President Trump’s director of social media, confirmed this in an April 2017 interview with the Fox News Network2). There’s a pattern to his recurrent tweets, evidenced by his use of punctuation, capitalization, and wording, that strongly suggests that he is the person sending many of the tweets. Unfortunately, this has fed the public perception that if he is the one sending the tweets, then someone wishing to threaten him can send him a tweet in response. This has led to an enormous number of threatening tweets directed both at Trump, using his Twitter handle, and in response to his own tweets.
The Secret Service does not have the manpower required to handle this volume of social media tweets. They will have to evolve with the changing “rules” for social media usage because Trump has reset the “rules” for what a president or presidential candidate can do on Twitter. How are political consultants going to reasonably tell their presidential candidates in future presidential campaigns that active, personal engagement on the platform is a strategic loser, given Trump’s tremendous success doing precisely that? And since sending a Secret Service agent out in the field to investigate every Twitter threat (the volume of which is likely to explode in future campaigns) isn’t a plausible option, the question is, what can they do? This will be uncomfortable for the Secret Service, but they are going to have to partner up with local law enforcement on PI cases. “PI” stands for protective intelligence (what I’ve been referring to as a threat case), and the Secret Service takes PI cases so seriously that every PI case is managed out of a headquarters division exclusively dedicated to PI case management. The management of the Secret Service has always feared turning over the management of PI cases to the field offices because the investigation of a presidential threat is an elaborate process within the Secret Service, and when a PI case is opened, it is difficult to close. Because of this elaborate administrative process, Secret Service headquarters was concerned that managers in Secret Service field offices would avoid opening PI cases to escape the massive mound of paperwork required to close these cases if they turn out to be false alarms. But this PI case investigation and management process was designed for an older era, when snail-mailed threats were relatively rare and phoned-in threats from landlines were easy to locate. In this new era of difficult-to-track e-mail and social media threats, the Secret Service is going to have to abandon this headquarters-centric approach to managing PI cases. They are going to have to turn control of these cases over to the Secret Service field offices, and the local Secret Service field offices will have to partner with local law enforcement to appropriately investigate these cases. The model for this isn’t new. The Secret Service already does this with counterfeit currency cases. Counterfeiting U.S. currency, although limited in scope, isn’t rare enough for the Secret Service to be able to run every case into the investigative ground. Therefore, to prosecute counterfeiters, the Secret Service works with local and state law enforcement on smaller counterfeiting cases to prosecute them through the local and state systems.
The Secret Service would be well suited to provide sophisticated training to local and state partners in order to move forward with a partnership on PI cases. There would likely be enormous managerial pushback from the Secret Service because of the fear of local law enforcement misdiagnosing a threat case (a potential attack that could have been prevented), but this is the only palatable choice they have. Unless the Secret Service plans on hiring tens of thousands of additional agents to investigate every late-night Twitter threat directed at the president, their choices are (1) pick and choose which threats to investigate or (2) decentralize the PI investigative model and train and trust local and state partners to help on PI cases.
9
TEMPORARY PROTECTION AGENTS, THE “WOW” FACTOR, AND WHITE HOUSE STAFF ASS-KISSING
THE SPECIAL AGENT MANPOWER CRISIS in the Secret Service has caused a cascade of problems throughout the agency. One of those problems became headline news in March 2017 when it was widely reported that two Secret Service agents, while transporting President Trump’s eight-year-old grandson, Donald Trump III, snapped a selfie with him while he was sleeping in the back of a vehicle the agents were driving. Trump’s grandson awoke in the middle of the photo, and his parents, Donald Trump Jr. and Vanessa Trump, were understandably disturbed by the incident. I was employed as an agent for over a decade, and I’ve taken many photos with protectees – some at their request, some as a courtesy to PPD agents, and some taken by members of the media – but I cannot fathom why two adults trained as Secret Service agents and charged with securing the life of an eight-year-old boy, would think it was appropriate to snap a selfie with a sleeping child. The creepy factor in this story is extraordinary, and when the story became public, a number of current agents I keep in contact with relayed to me that even the m
ost forgiving agents were repulsed by the story. Most Secret Service agents are parents first, and many of them felt that this wasn’t only an abdication of the agent’s official duties; it was an embarrassment to the agency and the people working within it. But with the manpower crisis in the Secret Service, this event, however creepy, is explainable.
The Secret Service’s two largest permanent protection details, the Presidential Protective Division (PPD) and the Vice Presidential Protective Division (VPPD), are difficult assignments for agents to get. Contrary to public perception, most of the Secret Service’s special agents are not assigned to these protection details. Most Secret Service agent staff are assigned to investigative field offices. Due to their preference for experienced agents only, it takes a Secret Service agent anywhere from seven to ten years of above-average performance in his or her investigative field office assignment before that agent is eligible for reassignment to either the PPD or VPPD protection detail. This limits the pool of agents eligible for these assignments for a couple of reasons. First, not every agent assigned to a field office will be an above-average performer. “Above-average” would obviously be meaningless if there weren’t an accompanying group of below-average performers in the field offices. Many of these below-average performing agents will be assigned to positions in intelligence, on the Dignitary Protective Division, or they will remain in the field office throughout their careers because no other division of the Secret Service will accept them. Second, the manpower crisis on both the Uniformed Division side of the Secret Service and on the special agent side has caused the Secret Service to hemorrhage mid-career officers and agents. This phenomenon is especially prevalent during the busy presidential election campaign seasons where younger agents, hired in the years immediately preceding a presidential campaign, and with no experience in dealing with the rigors of arduous workweeks on the campaign trail, leave the Secret Service relatively early in their young careers because of the shock of the campaign workload. (Note: the Secret Service has hidden some of their shocking attrition numbers in the past by classifying agents who leave for employment in other federal agencies as “transfers” rather than resignations.) As is the case with the Uniformed Division officers, many of the older, veteran special agents, have invested so much of their lives into the Secret Service that it becomes an indispensable part of their identity, and they stay with the agency, not wishing to start over later in life with another federal law enforcement agency. This leaves the Secret Service with a noticeable experience gap of mid-career agents, eligible to be assigned to the PPD and the VPPD, who are both still young enough to physically perform at an elite level in the protection mission, and experienced enough to avoid being prone to the “wow factor.”
