Dan Bongino Blows Open Secret Service’s Failure To Protect Trump

In a stunning revelation, popular conservative pundit Dan Bongino told The Daily Wire on Wednesday that an insider source told him a local police counter-sniper post never showed up for the rally in Pennsylvania where a gunman opened fire from a nearby rooftop and nearly assassinated former President Donald Trump.

Bongino, who previously served in the New York Police Department and the U.S. Secret Service, also relayed that President Joe Biden’s White House and the Homeland Security Department (DHS) instructed Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to clam up about the security failure at the event or risk losing her job.

An “unimpeachable source” divulged last night that there was “supposed to be a local police department counter-sniper post,” Bongino told Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro. “There were two Secret Service counter-sniper teams. That was supposed to be an additional one. Apparently … that post never showed up.”

EXCLUSIVE: @DBongino provides shocking new revelations about USSS failures in attempted assassination of Former President Trump – including that WH told Cheatle she needs to 'shut her mouth or she's out' pic.twitter.com/g2iwKDPNhM

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) July 17, 2024

Bongino cautioned that he did not want to speculate about the reason for the absence but stated that it would explain why the Secret Service early on “appeared to pawn the blame off on the locals.” And, when the agency faced blowback, he said the Secret Service blamed the roof’s slope for not having someone stationed on the building.

Yet now the Secret Service is “getting backlash” for the roof claim, which was made by Cheatle in an interview with ABC News, Bongino noted. “They don’t know what to do, they don’t want to tell the truth that they just never checked the post that he showed up, and the post didn’t, so now they’re burying themselves,” he said.

Investigations are underway into the security failure that allowed the gunman to get on a nearby rooftop and shoot Trump in the ear in addition to killing one rallygoer and injuring two others. A Secret Service sniper reportedly shot and killed the gunman from another building while other personnel rushed to protect Trump.

Bongino said the White House and DHS are giving Cheatle “very strict orders” to “basically shut her mouth about this or she’s out,” adding that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is “vigorously” defending Cheatle because he “basically knows she has all the cookies in the cookie jar, and there’s no excuse for that.”

The host of “The Dan Bongino Show” also talked to Shapiro about what he described as the “golden rule of Secret Service Protection, or any EP, Executive Protection for that matter,” which he explained was “when a threat presents itself, you get off the ‘X'” where the assailant is planning to hit a mark — in this case, on stage.

“The ‘X’ is where that protectee’s standing, or is in a car, a vehicle gets stopped and they start firing at it with RPGs, you get the hell off the ‘X.’ Cover and evacuate. That is rule number one. It’s Charlie Brown Encyclopedia EP Executive Protection. Why was he even on the ‘X’ in the first place?” Bongino said.

“The guy was using a rangefinder at 5:41 p.m.,” he said about the gunman. “Trump didn’t walk on stage till 6. They have a holding room, Ben, at every site. It’s called the holding room for a reason. It’s a very sophisticated thing, Ben. Get ready. You know why? Because they hold the president there when something’s amiss.”

Bongino, in wrapping up his comments on the topic, said, “Why was he not in the holding room? Why did you let him walk on stage with an open threat? The catastrophic failures in judgment here are legion, and it’s hard for me, as a guy who’s very proud of this agency and what I did there, to digest this all.”