Life Inside the Bubble: Why Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino Walked Away from It All

good afternoon welcome to the heritage foundation and our lewis lehrman auditorium we of course welcome those who join us on our heritage.org website on all of these occasions welcome those two who will be joining us in the future on c-span book tv we would ask everyone here in-house to make that last courtesy check that you've turned off cell phones as we prepare to begin it is always appreciated and of course we will post the program within 24 hours on the heritage homepage for everyone's future reference it's a pleasure today to welcome former u.s secret service agent dan bongino to heritage mr bongino began his law enforcement career with the new york police department in 1995 as a police cadet while attending the city university of new york where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology concentrating both on neuropsychology and behavioral learning he served as a member of of the distinguished pattern identification unit which specializes in the identification and apprehension of serial criminals he also performed many hours of undercover operations in a number of inner city communities he became a full-time police officer in 1997 and spent the next two years on control in brooklyn he then joined the u.s secret service in 1999 and focusing on computer crimes bank fraud credit card fraud protective intelligence and counterfeiting during his tenure as a special agent with the secret service he also completed his second graduate degree a masters of business administration from penn state university then in 2002 he became an instructor at the secret service training academy in nearby beltsville maryland he earned the president he entered the presidential protective division during president george w bush's administration and remained on protective duty there for the first term of president barack obama we're pleased today to hear a little bit of inside that bubble some here at heritage have been in the bubble but not quite the one that our guest has been in we do welcoming him here and look forward to hearing about his life inside the white house and prior welcome dan thank you all thanks for coming i appreciate it especially on this uh this day with this terrible weather but i woke up this morning i expected it to be a lot worse and uh it really wasn't that bad it was the old 1 30 wake-up call which is really the not going to sleep call we're on the radio this morning but yeah it was uh it wasn't too bad out there thank god so i thank you for coming thank you to heritage and uh special thank you to my friend kelly for uh really providing some sage advice over the last couple of years in a number of different aspects of my life thank you for having me and constantly being available even though i probably annoy you on your cell phone more than you'd care to thank you very much i appreciate it um i want to talk for about 15 or 20 minutes and i'd like to start with my job with the nypd with the police department and how it changed my internal compass and it was it was a strange occurrence i had with a young young man that's in the book then i'd like to just delve into a bit in some of the secret service years and some of the people i met with and how i just found it to be an incredible experience and i just want to leave it with my sense of i guess we could call it frustration and the reason i left and this kind of battle the friction i had had between my experiences with really good people and what i saw as an institutional problem with the government and its failure um to do the even the easy things well and the reason i walked away but starting uh with my police experience i never actually wanted to be a police officer um i yeah i wanted to go to medical school i wanted to be a doctor i took the mcats not too long ago actually i was watching grey's anatomy with my wife and my type a personality i said i think i'm going to take the mcats she said well nobody just thinks they're going to take the mcats i said no i'm going to i did pretty well unfortunately i didn't get in but yeah that's a whole other story but yeah i never wanted to be a police officer but i talk about in the opening of the book a childhood that and i don't mean this to be a sob story by any stretch i think it's our scars that make us who we are uh i worship every every lump in those scars it really made me who i am today and it enabled me to see uh there is real evil in the world and i think that's sometimes a perspective on the liberal left that gets lost if you don't understand that it's very difficult uh to find a policy prescription forward but we uh had a household that had been ravaged by a bad divorce um some income problems and a family member who thought that you know child abuse physical abuse was you know was an appropriate outlet for uh his internal rage and when you're a young kid witnessing that uh it's tough you feel about as helpless as you've ever felt in your life when you were you when you were you know a nine-year-old and a ten-year-old and you're watching this happen and you know there's nothing you can do it's disturbing and i found peace and and and just serenity only in the police officers when they would show up it seemed to be the only thing this individual in our life that it caused all this pain was afraid of nothing else i mean there was really no man or woman that scared him except for the blue uniform and i remember thinking that one night i documented in the book when it really had gotten chaotic and out of control i remember seeing the police officers show up and saying wow like what a job the you are meeting people and and worlds are colliding at their absolute lowest that that for me was the lowest that had gotten the pain and the fear was incredible and you have the ability to turn it around like that and i thought i've got to at least try it so that's what led me to the new york city police department of course started an idealist i think we all do in law enforcement and i tell the story in the book about being uh on the street one night and i'm i'm doing a 6 p.m to 2 a.m shift it's quite busy it was a 7-5 precinct we had a t-shirts made up there's a radio station in new york 10 10 wins for any uh you know the station here 10 10 wins it's a it's kind of a news station they had an expression you give us 10 minutes we'll give you the world well the precinct i was in the 7-5 precinct which was east new york brooklyn was very busy there was a drug war going on between the uh you know a lot of the different rival projects in the neighborhood it's kind of like a turf war um there was something like 300 homicides the year before i had gotten there and that one precinct now put that in perspective 300 homicides the entire city of baltimore last year had 200. this was one of 78 precincts so it was an extremely tough area and it really was a rude awakening you know for a young 20 year old especially a young 20 year old idealist who thought he could change the world in one fell swoop it was tough but i was standing on the corner one night and i saw this young kid who i'd seen quite a bit i don't know how old he was he may have been 10 11. needless to say should not have been out on the street at the time of night i was out in the street it was probably midnight or 1am and for some reason i struck him uh i struck a conversation up with him that night i remember saying to him you know what do you want to do when you grow up and he looked at me quizzically as if the question had really baffled him like he never thought about what to do when you go what that really meant would he he clearly didn't have an answer so i said what do you want to you know what do you want to do you want to be a doctor an engineer a lawyer what do you want to do i mean what's your job how do you want to make money and he said to me he said i want to be like a z and i thought change did you say jay-z now at the time he was jay-z was an up-and-coming rapper in new york in that area wasn't as famous as he is today and i thought okay he wants to be jay-z and he said to me no not jay-z i want to be easy and for a second i had to think about it i thought az az was one of these local drug dealer kids who was a real punk but once in a while he put on a performance in the little like atrium like open-ended open area in the middle of the the housing projects and it occurred to me it was really almost a transformative moment that his america was not ours there's no question about it he did not only not want to be jay-z he wanted to be easy that to me was staggering i would you know one i was almost okay with and i could not get this kid out of my mind i remember drive wasn't a long commute home i actually lived in the bordering neighborhood right right over the hill as i said cypress hill and i couldn't get him out of my head thinking how is it that this part of new york centrally located it was probably no more than 20 minutes from manhattan right off the belt parkway right off the jackie robinson parkway you know the area i'm talking about it is it could not be more geographically suited to economic growth what is wrong i mean the big question not why are there potholes in the street why is there an elevated grand larceny auto number in this precinct what is wrong with this particular area it seemed to me that no one could answer the big questions i mean what did a nuclear bomb go off here it didn't make any sense this kid was no different it didn't seem when you got him in a conversation than i was when i was nine or ten yet his america wasn't mine the idea of being a doctor writing a book an engineer had never even occurred to him and i thought that there's something going on here that i have to have some role in changing and it really sparked an interest not particularly in politics as we would think in political races and candidates but it sparked an interest in me in ideology liberal versus conservative libertarian versus green economic ideology austrian school versus chicago school that there's got to be an answer here and whatever answer there is clearly wasn't implemented here and i would dig and i would dig and i started and that's eventually how i found the secret service i was reading a book called my mind hunter and i was going to go into the fbi after that mine hunter was about their profiling program and i was in graduate school at the time studying neuropsychology and i really found that fascinating but i was explaining to this woman i was running next to on a treadmill who happened to be a police officer one day who would work with the secret service and i was really fascinated by this you know the politics of it and ideology and she says well i really think you need to check out the secret service looking back to be fair and self-critical which i think i think is important it was probably the wrong call i should not have enmeshed myself in a political process that i knew was watering a seed that was only going to grow and eventually sprout a tree that was going to rupture the concrete i just didn't expect it to really become part of me as it did i thought politics economic ideology would be a secondary interest and it wasn't but i found the secret service and i loved the job i say to people all the time it's the closest thing to being famous without anybody knowing who you are there's none of the downsides but you get to live this life and be part of government at the absolute highest levels it was an incredible um experience matter of fact ian who's sitting right over there hope i didn't i worked with him quite a bit it was at the prudential center right in newark the devils that was fun when uh john corzine uh was trying to get re-elected and he lost to this guy you may have heard of chris christie a couple you've probably heard of him now i knew he was going to lose though that day you know because we tried to remember we tried to fill the stadium and i think they thought they'd get 20 000 people and would they get about eight i said oh this guy's gonna lose bad and i was right i think he lost by a few points but i found it incredible in the secret service because again i kept thinking what is wrong here what happened in that 7-5 precinct and i kept thinking as a government is it government needs a government and i was always fascinated in the secret service having worked with people from literally the white house on down to an administrative assistant in hhs somewhere because the secret service is an interesting job you're always traveling around to different agencies visiting people they bring in temporary staffers that everybody was so terrific to work with so i thought it can't be a matter of of personal incompetence i mean the men and women of the service the staff i worked with they would work eight in the morning to midnight every night on a far in advance for no overtime at all and no one ever complained about it it just was the job the mission was clear and i went to afghanistan with president obama and i remember looking in the face of this delta force uh operator who was going to go meet the president and although it's my one knock on the staffer on the trip so this delta he has that thousand mile stare you know what i'm talking about kelly you could tell this this if you could tap into and download his brain he had some stories some he probably wouldn't tell you but they would have been fascinating and uh this staffer who was slightly out of touch came over to me and i remember him saying well you know can you ask him we're on bogram air base in the middle of a war zone there's armed soldiers everywhere and he said he could ask that guy to leave his weapons outside when he meets with the president i thought you ask him like there is no way i'm doing that sorry yeah i said you go he didn't ask him so he wound up going in but i remember meeting the delta force guy and talking to him and thinking these men and women that government military administrative people our special agents are just such fascinating folks what's going wrong so time went on and i just got more and more disconnected from what i felt in my case was a parasitic lifestyle and i don't mean that in any qualitative way is a reflection on government work it's strictly personal i looked around at my neighbors we were in the well i believe we still are but we were in a really bad recession at the time and i was suffering no ill consequences at all not a bid gas prices went up i had a government gas card i had a government car my salary went up every year there were no inflation adjustments unless they went up and i felt like i had no skin in the game and i thought in a country like we have it isn't it odd that when you go to our when you see our immigrant population i always thought of this gentleman i met who owned the subway store and you near the secret service training center came here from pakistan with nothing and was now making six figures just randomly decided to open up a subway restaurant that we we're not risk takers anymore we've almost fallen into a middle class apathy and we've let the country just kind of slowly dissipate around us and not only do we not do the you know people ask me all the time in politics you know what what can we do and i say you're asking the wrong questions i say the right question is not can we do the question is what are you doing now there are people who ask me that question who i say who's your congressman they have no idea think about the the apathy that's bred in the country i mean in a midterm election it's it's not uncommon for up to 50 percent of the people not to even vote and i thought i i can't i i can't do that i'm sorry i'd rather i'd rather die poor and my wife and i had a long prolonged conversation because i do have i had one daughter at the time i have two now but i had very uh there were very real consequences to me leaving so after about five or six months of having this conversation i remember my wife we were going down to a cinco de mayo party in my cul-de-sac i actually just ran into the woman again this weekend and uh she turned to me and said i'm not going to talk you out of this am i and i said no she said okay do it go in and resign i don't really so i drove in that monday and quickly resigned and on the way in she told me uh by the way do you know why i was sick last night i said no she said uh it's because i'm pregnant it had been eight years so yeah i thought the heavens do have a way of putting a price on things don't they so i walked upstairs told the boss my wife was pregnant i was resigning uh he was a good guy tim he thought i was nuts i was ready to call the secret service psychologist and i walked out and they have a blast door in the secret service to you know to take ballistic rounds a really heavy steel door and when it slammed it would really rock the whole building it was amazing and when i walked out and that door slammed i tell you not to be melodramatic but it was the loudest sound i'd ever heard it still kind of echoes because i knew that was the last time that door would ever shut and i walked away and jumped in the longest of long shot united states senate races potentially in american history did it starting with two donors me and my dad worked out kind of well and i don't want to get into the politics of the race you know we eventually lost but it was an incredible experience i built a lot of character um in me and it taught me a lot about the system that i thought i had already seen being a secret service agent haven't been through three presidential elections i thought this was all old hat but i did learn a lot about the process and folks it's the process that's broken and the when i say the process i don't only mean what traditionally i think the general public sees when i say you've been sold out all of you have been sold out you've been sold out unless you have the money or a block of voters that you can influence that you can move a representative in your direction they have no interest in you but you've been sold out internally too by internal interests that have taken precedence over taxpayer interest i'll give you an example you may say to yourself i know i did and if you don't you should why do we have all of these different law enforcement agencies this alphabet soup why i mean does anyone have a you know a common sense answer that i've never heard one and i would think about it over and over again why do we have a secret service an fbi you know a a a cia but then a dia why do we handle these well here's how the system works and here's where the siren needs to be sounded because as the bureaucracy grows what happens is when everybody's responsible for something the tragedy of the commons nobody is and that's how you get a situation like benghazi where they ultimately admit openly in the orb the accountability review board that oh we didn't know it went through the bureaucracy as if that's just some fugue state it's not real people well here's the way it works the reason people in specific factions don't want to give up responsibility for whatever it may be let's say it's bank fraud or credit card fraud is because there's no power in yes in the government there's only power and no when i can sit there as a federal agent and i have jurisdiction over a crime you need investigated in the private sector you need to come to me because i have monopoly power over that there's no private police force so it's in my best interest to maintain that relationship because you have the private money and when i leave believe me i'm going to ask you for repayment so if i give up whatever that may be bank fraud where there's money interest in everything i now lose my angle when i retire it's it's not during your time in the government where you make your money it's when you leave and it's this dreaded carousel that's causing the problem now it's the very same problem when it comes to the lobby side it's the moneyed interest that can buy off specific aspects of our government that have controlled everything including policy very rarely does your representative actually represent you the process is very simple you get a pack the pac donates to me you get access you get to make your case if i don't think it's going to be catastrophic for me electorally and i can put up a smoke screen i'm going to go out i'm going to vote for that piece of legislation assuming you continue to support me later on and fund my campaign it's all about not only the preservation of my contacts in the private sector internally but about maintaining access to that private sector later on when either i leave congress or whatever it may be and maintaining access to that money pool folks it's a it's an extremely pernicious problem because again as this bureaucracy grows what you're seeing is a sandwiching of layers where upper management and political appointees love it because it allows them to absorb the blow of a bad decision by blaming it on a bureaucracy and the american people have just come to accept it imagine if we did that in the private sector if apple everybody always uses apple but i guess because everybody has an iphone so do i poor apple no i love apple but uh if god forbid apple was to launch a product the product was to fail catastrophically you would see a decision-making tree where at some point i assure you everybody would be held accountable i don't know if they would get fired maybe a pay cut may be moved maybe nothing who knows maybe they come back with a winner next time but you see none of that in the government and it's just accepted and i wrote in the last three chapters of the book as kind of a foil to the earlier chapters telling about my experience with some really good people in government i wrote about the boston bombing benghazi and fast and furious as examples of what i just told you think about the boston bombing you can put yourself on google alert kali simpson dan bongino just go to google or put your name in there you will get in a millisecond at email if your name appears on the internet amazing isn't it i mean you could think about that years ago you would have to go to the library go through all these newspapers and look but in the federal government we had one of the sarnia brothers that traveled to dagestan and back was in the fbi's terrorist information database environment ties he was he so-called pinged as to use janet napolitano's words pinged in text the treasury enforcement system and nobody thought there was anything wrong or nobody followed up in an appropriate manner does that not strike you as odd in a government that spends trillions of dollars no one thought there was anything wrong with that folks again if it was a private sector jobs would be at stake salaries would be at stake promotions would be at stake but yet nothing happens i assure you it is not a reflection of the good people who act as our federal agents i promise you i've never met one who if they saw a situation like that wouldn't run with it if they could stop an active terrorist attack but no one thinks anything of it because as the bureaucracy grows again the tragedy of the commons gets worse and worse and worse and what's the byproduct lazy bureaucratic efforts to stop what they can't stop through common sense reforms vis-a-vis the the nsa let's just do you know blanket surveillance at this point rather than looking at hey why do we have all these federal agencies i bring up another example at the end of the book and quoting the arb the accountability review board that reviewed the benghazi situation where they clearly state they had a manpower problem and i contrast that with the raid on it was it the gibson guitar factory yeah they had imported wood from is it indonesia or whatever it may be now think about this you have us government inc right they have a situation in benghazi in an active conflict zone there's no question about that documented requests for security over and over and over again the orb comes out and says well you know there's a lot of bureaucracy and bottom line there's a manpower problem yet it doesn't bother anyone or strike them as odd that we had enough guys to go raid the gibson guitar factory over imported wood priorities are those really our priorities so it's easy to complain suggestion going forward and i'd like to take your questions if we were to streamline these federal agencies an intelligence operation an internal affairs investigation type operation and one federal law enforcement operation segmented into different divisions kinds of kind of like the nypd had you could have cross training you could move people around you could take advantage of economies of scale of scope everything the private sector does you could streamline you could promote faster promotion rules everything from promotion tests could all be economized we could save tons of money and at the same time reallocate manpower towards priorities like that we can't do that now even in the secret service when we need people we have to put out requests to other agencies we just call them otas other treasury agents goes through these big channels wastes all kinds of money just to get a guy with a gun to show up we wouldn't have to do any of that we could start to prioritize terrorism first organized crime second whatever it may be and reallocate manpower efficiently and not have to worry about six agents breaking into gibson guitars to bust up an imported wood ring while our embassy in benghazi has no security i find that unforgivable and i think in the private sector with the profit motive and the motive to incentivize and create greater productivity i think we could we could fix it but uh we don't have that in the government because remember what i said the economic interest is always for you to continue to retain as much power as you can because there is no power in yes there is only power in me as a government official with a monopoly over that investigation to be able to tell you no and you need me and when when i create a need i create a request later on it's going to be my request from you it can we can fix it though folks and i think it's going to take some good passionate people um going forward and i think it's going to take more people to speak out there's a i think right now there's a crisis of of internal leadership i think people during a recession are afraid uh to leave but i speak to people all the time on my cell phone on the inside who are just as frustrated as i am whether from the military or anywhere else and i think it's going to take just a tidal wave of people speaking out to really create some effective change so i i appreciate you listening i'd love to take your questions and for those who read the book i appreciate it and if you'd like to read it later on you think you'll see what i'm talking about in those last few chapters so thank you very much thank you dan and we will take questions if you'll be so kind to wait till the microphone is at your location and identify yourself as a courtesy to our guest do we have a question i knew we would milton grenfell just citizen at large um do you think that that uh part of the problem is a is a risk aversion in our culture that you know whenever there's some tragedy of violent nature there a lot multi-million dollar lawsuits come out of it from the victims of the you know the families of the victims and this sort of thing um so everyone feels obliged to maximize security so that god forbid something does happen you say well i had xxyz people watching out for it nothing happened um you think about during the civil war i mean the enemy was just across the river i mean and lincoln just you know he had he had an open house and sunday afternoon he had a couple of pinkerton guards standing there and um during world war ii i mean war with japanese and italians and you know germans and yet the city function wasn't in a lockdown anywhere near like it is now yeah uh uh you know the capital you'd walk in and out of it uh i mean it seems that we have um we're trying to prevent any sort of violence i think almost like we're just afraid of taking risks and it seems like do you think that kind of mentality may be part of the problem um i do but i think we're in a much different uh environment than we were back then and i think it's a function of technology uh the ability right now to spread a dirty bomb the power of explosives growing exponentially um the access to uh just to weapons uh non-traditional weapons and frankly the social modeling effect of you know before i went into the secret service i was a graduate student fascinated by psychology and social modeling the ability to watch what another human being does and then replicate the behavior yourself is almost a unique a uniquely human behavior why do i say that because you see things like the school shootings there's no question in my mind that the the the growth in this sad tragic phenomenon is a result of press coverage of the actual event which is created in a 24-hour news cycle with blogging 24-hour internet facebook and the ability to tweet i mean remember that when we hit uh bin laden in uh in pakistan there was a a gentleman who lived there in pakistan who tweeted that there were helicopters overhead before they even landed so in a 24-hour culture right now saturated with information worldwide any tragic event has the capacity to set off almost a proliferation cascade of new tragic events trying to replicate it so i your to your first point are we a little hyper sensitive um yes but secondly i would say the environment is definitely much different and to add on to that i i again i i write in the book the the environment for terrorism and counter-terror specifically has become very dangerous because i use the business model the traditional model of terror was the franchise model it was a cell al-qaeda inc al-qaeda inc think of it like a mcdonald's right you buy a mcdonald's as a franchisee you're an al-qaeda franchisee and what do you do you have to buy the burgers the material take your orders from mcdonald's central but you technically operate your own store but you really don't you're following there in al qaeda we'd call it propaganda mcdonald's would call it marketing right really it's no different in a way you're trying to influence behavior that franchise model was dangerous but it was not as dangerous as the model we're in now the sole proprietor model and i'll tell you why the franchise model of terror left a lot of breadcrumbs i worked a lot of these cases federally as a secret service agent on long island one of them i actually mentioned in the book and i talk about i couldn't even get information on my own case from the fbi it was absurd they would redact data from it was my investigation and i thought this is insane i can carry a gun onto air force one i can't get information on a guy i'm investigating from another federal agency but what you'll see right there with sole proprietor terror is it doesn't leave the breadcrumbs when you look at a situation like 911 and i don't mean this qualitatively but the spectacular nature of the attack you had flight schools you had multiple training sessions multiple contacts which always led left the breadcrumb behind that's an investigative tip you're not seeing that now the sarniev brothers were very much sole proprietors they had very little contact at all with what you would consider core al qaeda al qaeda central if any what they did is they they went to the internet which is a 24-hour propaganda machine if you're seeking that out saw inspire magazine a couple pressure cookers and took upon themselves to create this bomb and shut down an entire city i would argue the effects although not as spectacular in the tragic sense as 9 11 were nearly as devastating and those sole proprietor terrorists out there do not leave the breadcrumbs what are you going to do watch every american's internet traffic well the nsa that may be a silly question but you see what i'm saying you can't do that in lifetime so we are in a different environment but i i agree that we are hypersensitive and i think it's largely of a reflection unfortunately of political correctness as well um you know i'm a libertarian at heart i believe every man and woman on this earth is a child of god but if someone says to me you know you're looking for a a green male who's six foot six um and missing his left finger that's who i want to go after i use these absurd physical characteristics because insert another random race culture creed religion and everybody gets offended as if you did something wrong in law enforcement just because i may be looking for someone who i know attends a certain uh religious facility or doesn't mean i have anything as a law enforcement officer against the particular we're just following the trail and i think it becomes even even more dangerous now because what you get is blanket surveillance in the case of the nsa which i disagree with fundamentally i think it's it's it's a silly way to do it and you also have blanket screening which is absurd i mean really the tsa the folks in this room i mean how much time are you going to wait do you realize the economic productivity lost every year to screen 999 out of 1000 people who won't even have a nail clipper on them it's a waste so i hope that the environment is different and you're both you're right on both fronts yes sir he's coming my name is eloni disickly i study global affairs apply for the post secretary general united nations and as a global affairs from this point of view you're absolutely right only i want to add all other world to your words because danger for all humanity it is not danger for united states right so problem can be resolved only in the united nations if i can do this service i wrote here a request to you you can read for people or personally for you it's open letter with attachment i request you to support my community and you will win here and united states at last will be really the most happiest nations on the planet if continued to lead in the way historical way constitutional way not what we have now well you're not going to get an argument for me on that one i'm i'm certainly uh an avid constitutional conservative with a strong libertarian bent if you don't have a a process and you don't have fidelity to a set of rules you have nothing but chaos there's no way to argue otherwise um on your first point yes i it's definitely a global fight but i can only argue from my perspective within the secret service i wasn't subject to global global rules i i think there are some that use a heavy-handed approach globally that aren't limited by the rules we have in this country that actually have a blowback effect that makes the environment even worse i don't mean that and i'm not talking about a mill from a military perspective because i know that terms taken on a different meaning for some but i mean from a law enforcement perspective having traveled around the world as a secret service agent i think some of the tactics are extremely ineffective and only wind up creating internal propaganda later on when this situation could have been handled far different sometimes in law enforcement honey works a lot better than vinegar and just in my experience yes in the back thank you merry christmas to all merry christmas and sir i have a two-part question uh first of all as an active secret service agent well i know you're a former right at this time but while on active duty i may ask why did you not specifically attend to i believe which is the real crux of all of the problems and issues that you have mentioned which is article 2 section 1 of the united states constitution which deals with the qualifications to be president and if i if i may just quote no person except a natural-born citizen or a citizen of the united states at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall be president and of course there are two other qualifications so may ask why did you not deal with the greatest threat the threat being a threat as military as an officer and the threat is a domestic threat and also an international to america because right now we do have an unconstitutionally unconstitutional president and that poses the greatest threat not only in america but throughout the world and then i have a part-time all right well hold on let's do it's a lot of that's a lot of part one before you get to part two yeah uh unfortunately it's not true um listen the president united states was born i have nothing else to say on that the president was born in the united states well i can't argue about that so you're going to have to go on to another question do we have another question from the audience yes ma'am over here hello i understand that you're running for congress again for 2014. can you talk about sort of why you want to get into a body that only has nine percent approval rating and what you think you can do to sort of maybe help them out a little bit well i can't get too into it um but just talking generally about congressional approval ratings uh congress is kind of funny when people tell you a nine percent approval rating because then when you ask them about their individual congressman like oh i think he's great well if they know who it is you know who's your yeah it's kind of funny he asks people sometimes um there's always this uh i don't actually live in the district that i'm running i will eventually but uh i'll say to people does that bother you and they say well you know not really and i said what district are you in they go i don't know so that's probably why you don't you know people when they talk about congress talk about it like it's some uh you know cloud this fog like it's not made of real people when you get to the real people they usually generally like their congressman this year may be different i think your analysis and those numbers are not not off um i i think uh that's largely a function of a lot of policy decisions by this administration and people's attachment to it i think when you get a letter in the mail that slaps you in the face that says you've lost your healthcare it makes it very real for a lot of people really fast a lot of policy decisions don't have that effect you know when you think of something like taxes i mean with the income tax is your check bigger next year than it was this year a lot of people find that hard to uh you process in their head but something like in a health care letter saying hey find a new health care policy i'm kind of hurts them well yeah you know to answer the larger question as to why i would choose to get involved in it what was it a plato that said you know if you refuse to get involved in politics you're destined to be ruled by people lesser than yourself you know i ask you let me turn the question back on you what do you do i mean really all of you in this room we're all complainers i am i don't mean that in a bad way but what are you doing i'm not challenging you i'm just saying what are you doing the world has changed by action not by talk talk motivates action action's what changes the world and again i go back to that question before i get all the time what can we do what can we do what are you doing now oh nothing well what do you mean you're you're just letting this happen so if you don't get involved and take a risk like that pakistani subway owner i met who came here with nothing not a dime didn't even speak english and figured out in the greatest country on earth to make money what are you doing to change the process to make it a better tomorrow when you look at the most effective politicians of our time they weren't the people who told you how terrible yesterday was they told you they're planning their action plan for a better tomorrow and i think i have an obligation to people whose tax dollars supported a very nice lifestyle when i was within the secret service i have an obligation to give you something back believe me when i tell you folks the financial penalty for my decision was long lasting if you think you're going to make any money in books i got bad news for you you're not write one because it's a an ideological mission for you to get use it as a vehicle for your cause whatever it may be but if you think you're going to write a book and get rich and make back the three million dollars i left behind you know you're out of your mind i did this because i really believe in this we are the greatest country on earth we've been in worst places before but it takes people of action not just talk to get up and do something let me ask you one last question from the systemic solution you mentioned we understand that a lot of washington is fiefdoms not only just in the protection and defending us your proposal to put some of those together and have a different tree of responsibility i understand but how does that cross with your libertarian view will you not be centralizing too much power in some places as opposed to having some of this check and balance that some of these fiefdoms may for our benefit give us well essentially power's already centralized uh there's no there's already monopoly power over specific things to break up that monopoly power i'll give you an example let's just use i i love the secret service but that's where i was it just makes for a convenient example let's say you're a bank executive you don't want to pay millions of dollars a year for fraud investigators especially when the secret service and taxpayer dollars can pay to do it for free if i know you have monopoly power over bank fraud which we typically do the fbi gets involved as well but it's relatively monopoly power monopolistic again there's no power in me saying yes i i have to make you come to me now use the other example i have with the nypd which was one large centralized law enforcement operations very few other law enforcement operations in new york that have any power at all the sheriffs do a lot of towing they don't get involved in law enforcement but if i go to you and the nypd officer jones or whatever it may be and i need you to help me out and you say i'm not going to do it you have zero monopoly over that at all i just go to colley and say officer jones wouldn't help well officer simpson and if not i mean there's literally endless avenues for you to go to an endless plasticity so there i would argue strongly that there's already monopoly power and and centralizing it bureaucratically doesn't necessarily centralize the power it enables people different avenues within one larger bureaucracy and i know it's hard to swallow but when you see it from the inside the redundancy is absurd and i remember a story where in literally the same building i don't want to say who but the same building there were two federal agencies one had four or five distinct separate empty office offices excuse me they had nothing they couldn't fill them they were not going to hire people there was another agency the same building that needed the space do you know they went out and rented another office instead of just moving upstairs you you say you look you start to scratch your head and you say this is insane you know it's the whole milton friedman theory you know when other people spend other people's money on other people neither cost nor quality it'll ever matter it's true i'd rather other people spend other people's money on themselves at least the quality matters if not the cost right if i'm spending your money on something and it's my it's for me i'm gonna go buy the best suit i can find really at least we're incentivizing quality but when you spend taxpayer money on other people the quality doesn't matter either and that's how you get ridiculous decision-making processes like that multiplied by thousands you don't think there's waste in our budget folks it's absurd how much waste is in our budget it's literally absurd and if i could just add one more thing on that um on the other front because i i mentioned the the segmentation of federal law enforcement agencies but the other side i didn't dig into too much the lobby front which is realistic lobbying has been going on for eons okay it's nothing new but the source of all of our problems there is our tax code you know if i can give you a tax break because you make gray suits and i can give a tax break to a gray suit company and not give it to a blue suit company i've given you a competitive advantage in a field you don't have now you pay me back with uh donating to a pack which donates to my campaign and keeps me in power do you realize the economic distortion effect rippling through the economy multiplied that one transaction times thousands and thousands and thousands over decades think about how many value misjudgments were made because the pricing of a product is wrong because me as a politician could give you a tax break it's no small item why do you think the left fights so viciously against the flat and fair tax because it's unfair or unflat no they fight it so badly because again there is no power and yes and when they and everything say yes that hey you pay 15 you pay 15 you pay 15 it doesn't really matter everything say yes all of a sudden i'm powerless i've always said that's the best thing i could ever do for you if i managed to win is to leave the job much more powerless than when i came in it's supposed to be a representative government that was the idea thank thank you thanks a lot as mentioned we do have a few copies of our author's book here with us today life inside the bubble and of course is available readily on amazon.com and at bookstores in the area we do appreciate your kind attendance today i'm sure dan will be glad to continue the conversation after we adjourn which we do now thank you you

Channel: The Heritage Foundation

Views: 536,664

Rating: 4.888823 out of 5

Keywords: Heritage, Heritage Foundation, GOP, Conservative, Republican, Washington D.C., Dan Bongino, Secret Service, Barack Obama (US President), United States Secret Service (Organization), the heritage foundation, white house, secrets, president, potus, president's security

Id: 857tniuT0F8

Length: 47min 49sec (2869 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2013