MILWAUKEE—Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino tore into his former employer on Tuesday for security failures at the Pennsylvania campaign rally where an attempted assassin shot former President Donald Trump late Saturday afternoon.
Bongino, now a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host, sat down with The Daily Signal on Tuesday at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where he called for “mass resignations” from the Secret Service following the shooting.
Authorities fatally shot the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, as he lay on the roof of a nearby building from which he shot at Trump. One of the bullets grazed the former president in the ear, bloodying Trump.
Bongino specifically noted that authorities spotted the shooter behaving furtively 26 minutes before the shots were fired.
“Why was President Trump allowed on the stage?” he asked rhetorically.
Bongino also questioned a claim from the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, who said that the Secret Service hadn’t placed a countersniper team on the roof of the manufacturing building 130 years away where the gunman lay due to the slope of the roof.
“Well, the shooter didn’t seem to have any problem with the slope of that roof,” Bongino exclaimed, pointing out that the Secret Service had allowed the shooter a “clean line of sight,” suggesting it could have placed something as simple as a campaign banner at the roof’s edge to block a potential shooter’s line of sight.
“People should be criminally investigated for what happened here,” the talk-show host and podcaster said.
Asked whether he trusts the FBI to investigate the shooting, he laughed and responded: “That’s like asking an alcoholic if you trust Jose Cuervo. No, I absolutely don’t. I hope they prove me wrong. I’m also a realist, and I realize the FBI has some decent people. I worked with them.”
“The management right now is an abomination,” he added, “and what I’m afraid of is, even if you get a bunch of good rank-and-file investigators who find out something serious—I don’t what that is or could be; I don’t put out stuff I can’t back up. I don’t trust [FBI Director] Christopher Wray to tell people the truth. I just don’t.”
Bongino joked that if the shooter had been wearing a “Moms for Liberty” hat, “believe me, they’d have every story right now.”
“The guy’s parents would be in the gulag,” he said of Crooks.
“I hope they prove me wrong,” he said again, adding, “I don’t say things I can’t back up, and until I see some evidence they’re hiding stuff, I’ll reserve opinion, but their track record, I mean, can we just be honest? It’s from horrible to atrocious.”
Pressed as to whether he thinks the shooter was acting on his own or not, Bongino declined to speculate without confirmation, but he pointed to the fact that the 20-year-old gunman supposedly had no social media profile.
“I find that odd,” he said. “But I doubt [that it was an] inside job. There are so many people that would have to be read in on that plan. There’s always a leaker … but I don’t discount anything. After ‘Spygate’ and Russia collusion, it would be irresponsible for me to do the opposite, too, and go, ‘Oh, that didn’t happen.’”