Former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino was among those questioning security protocols after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Bongino, a former Secret Service agent as well as an ex-NYPD officer, criticized the security at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., over the weekend as President Donald Trump and other top administration officials were gathered in a ballroom filled with public officials, celebrities, and members of the media.
“The way the current security around the president operates, it’s in a kind of like a box within a box approach. That’s the way you have to think about it, where the restrictions are tighter as you get within arm’s reach of the president. You even have a program called an arm’s reach program, where there’s a different level of vetting,” Bongino explained on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Sunday as he examined an alleged third assassination attempt against the president.
(Video Credit: Fox News)
Bongino went on to describe details of security settings and attendee screening at events in general, as he contended that the Secret Service must be more proactive.
“I think in the autopsy of this afterwards…In an event like this with an open hotel doing business, where it’s resource-constrained, and it’s very difficult to shut down the whole hotel, was the security perimeter compressed too far inside?” Bongino asked. “They’re going to have to go over that and see in the future how much farther they want to push [the perimeter] out.”
After criticizing the “both sides” argument as “garbage,” as the left has predictably found a way to blame the president’s rhetoric for the shooting, Bongino expressed his concerns over Trump’s safety, saying, ” I am extremely concerned for this president and have been for a long time.”
“This has to be the luckiest man on Earth. I mean, you can have the greatest Secret Service in the world, guys, but the hard reality is they’re always reacting. And reacting is always slower than acting,” he said. “The Secret Service has to react. There’s always a fog-of-war problem. You can have Green Berets and SEAL Team Six out there, the greatest spec-op in the world, and compress the timeline, but reacting to someone else – I’m worried for him, and I’ve never seen anything like this from my time in law enforcement.”
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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.
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