How tenuous is the Clinton email scandal? Is there fear that, besides the fact of classified State Department documents on a private email account, maybe they could have been hacked? Maybe the U.S. got lucky and that didn’t happen to those unsecured thousands of sensitive emails…maybe they could have. New York Times bestselling author Dan Bongino served in the Secret Service under three Presidential administrations. When he left, prior to the infamous 2014 White House fence jumper incident, he was already convinced security failings were coming to an organization he served so proudly for so many years.
What led him to leave the Secret Service, while at the top of his profession, and with no political experience, to run for office? Not only run for office, both for the Senate and the Congress, but against enormous odds nearly pulling off stunning upsets the type of which would have both unsettled the balance of party power in either hall of Congress as well as stamped him as a rising star in the DC Beltway. His new book, THE FIGHT: A Secret Service Agent’s Inside Account of Security Failings and the Political Machine (St. Martin’s Press, on sale January 12, 2016, $26.99), is a powerful and disturbing insider account of the failings of presidential security and our political system, as well as a handbook on how citizens can fight back against inept leadership.
Bongino provides the reader with his personal insights on issues from national and personal security to big politics, including key topics and events such as:
• Sounding the alarm about the Hillary Clinton email scandal and her flagrant violation of email protocol which may be the least of the country’s problems if she’s elected President
• The White House fence jumper who may have done the country a favor by exposing the “crisis driven” federal bureaucracy noting the author’s behind the scenes account exposing the reasons behind our collapsing security infrastructure
• The drone crash at the White House seen as a harbinger of a dystopian security future where privacy will have to be bought, and your darkest secrets will be available to the highest bidder
• President Obama’s insulated ideological life which has forged him into a grossly inadequate Commander-in-Chief, Bongino addressed the President’s failure to understand what “the team” means to patriotic Americans
• Bongino was in front of the largest podium in the world while securing the President of the United States, and behind it himself as a candidate for office, where his behind the scenes experiences provide a must have handbook for anyone looking for reasons why our government is failing, and how to fight back
He has been at the top of one profession (security), and struggled mightily upstream in another (politics). It was those struggles in the latter that helped shape this book. As Bongino says, “I lost a congressional election as a complete outsider to the political process running against the political establishment and their limited interests. I had a number of opportunities to drink the ”Kool-Aid” and get their support, but I refused. My refusal to sell out on principle likely cost me an upset victory against the richest member of Congress as I fell one point short of winning in an overwhelmingly Democratic district. The book is a cautionary tale for both the politically involved and the casual observer, describing the forces working against us to corrupt the process.”
The vast majority of Americans experience only intermittent contact with the security apparatus of our nation and only come in to any type of contact with the world of politics when our evening dinner is interrupted by robo-calls looking for donations to a candidate or party. Dan Bongino has experienced the inner-workings of our national security at the highest level imaginable: the elite Presidential Protection Division. He also knows from his own blood, sweat and tears what going it alone...