The Dan Bongino Show - The Bongino Brief - Jan 09, 2021

Episode Date: January 9, 2021

How 50% of security and public safety is political. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dan Bongino. Welcome to the Bongino Brief. I'm Dan Bongino. I've been getting a lot of questions given my background in law enforcement and public safety with both the NYPD and Secret Service about the security failures at the Capitol, which were hard to describe in the scope of how bad the security system failed at the Capitol. It's not Monday morning quarterbacking that's easy to do. Monday morning quarterbacking is typically done easy to do. Monday morning quarterbacking is typically done when you want to poke fun at people. If you're getting that out of this segment, you were wrong. Even in the Secret Service, when we had failures on protection missions, we used to have this thing online, these tips. And the tips would usually be,

here's what happened on this one. Don't do it again. It was everything from don't put the sandbags on the president's side of the bike rack because it'll trip over him. And they would be like, well, who did that? And it was embarrassing if you did it, but you knew never to do it again. We need to do that now. The security failures at the Capitol

were a red siren for everyone that every single terrorist group around the world saw. But we will never ever be able to address the security failures without addressing political failures first. The Capitol Hill police, ladies and gentlemen, aren't stupid. There's 2,300 of them. They have a half a billion dollar budget. That is a bigger budget than the city of Detroit.

They protect just a couple of square miles. The city of Detroit protects an entire city and the Capitol Hill police have a bigger budget. They have almost as many people as the Suffolk County Police Department in New York, maybe more, 2,300. So you may say, well, Dan, with such a huge budget and an enormous police force up on Capitol Hill,

how did everything fail so badly? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I've seen it. I've seen it during my time with the NYPD, and I've seen it in the Secret Service. And the reason the security, quote, failed is because of planning influenced by political partners in the security equation, not the security people themselves. When your security is influenced by political decision-making rather than security decision-making, you don't have security. You have political security, which will fail every single time.

We need better politicians, ladies and gentlemen, not new police officers. The police officers know what they're doing. their failure was the failure of their management because their management both in dc metro police and their management in capitol hill were influenced by politicians and some of the managers over there were too weak to stand up i know that from the inside i've been doing these thought experiments over the last few days and i'd like to do one now if you think anything i'm telling you is controversial. Dan, 50% of security is political? Sadly, yeah, maybe more. Police know what they're doing.

It's the politicians that don't. You don't believe me? Ask yourself a simple question. Why is it that the chaos at the Capitol was stopped within hours and, thank the Lord, hasn't returned? Stopped within hours. Yet the siege at the Portland courthouse, federal courthouse, a federal building too, went on for months. Why did the siege at the White House when Donald Trump was inside go on for days,

if not that entire week? Why? Why did that happen? Why was that allowed to happen and go on for over a week and in the case of Portland, over a month, yet the happenings up on Capitol Hill were stopped within hours and have yet to return? Well, the answer is obvious if you're playing this thought experiment with me. Because it involved political decision-makings about favored versus unfavored groups that had nothing to do with security. When Donald Trump decided to close off the area surrounding the White House, because there was a legitimate security threat, I know it from people on the inside, you may say, oh, well, the media celebrated that because it's about security, right? No, it was about politics. The media saw an opportunity politically to damage Donald Trump,

so attacked him for militarizing the area around the White House and mocked him for trying to use the National Guard to ensure public safety. Interesting. Yet when we had a public safety situation at the Capitol and the National Guard was delayed due to Democrats, the media immediately turned to trying to blame Donald Trump for not sending in the National Guard. Wait, Joe, I thought when Donald Trump was going to send in a National Guard to defend the White House, that was a bad thing. But now when you're going to send in, or there was even a minor delay about sending the same National Guard to defend the Capitol, all of a sudden Donald Trump made the wrong decision.

What's the wrong decision? To send them or not send them? The answer is when you're an unprincipled lunatic like the people in the media and you're trying to influence policing decisions based on politics by pressuring politicians, the answer is whatever hurts your political opponent, Donald Trump is the right answer. So if Donald Trump deploys the National Guard to defend himself in the White House, he's a dangerous tyrant. But if Donald Trump waits 10 minutes to defend, to send the National Guard

to defend the Capitol, clearly this man's lost control of the country and doesn't believe in law and order. You still don't believe me that security and public safety is 50%, if not more political? How come the public safety response at the Capitol restored order in just hours

and the situation, thankfully, has not been repeated yet. The situation was repeated for days and weeks at the Portland court. What was the difference? Politicians and the media who saw an opportunity to put pressure on weak managers and police departments to make political decisions, not security ones. That was the difference. The Dan Bongino show.

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