The Team House - What Goes Into Security For The State of The Union w/ former USSS Agent Bill Gage

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Bill Gage is a former Secret Service Agent and worked each SOTU from 2003-2013. Bill served as a protection agent and on the CAT (Counter Assault Team).Check out Bill's company here:https://safehavensecuritygroup.com/home/Support the show here:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse#stateoftheunion #security #nationalsecurityBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. We would really appreciate it if you guys went and reviewed us on Apple or Spotify. Those reviews really help people find the podcast and help it get recognized. And, you know, if you've been enjoying the show, we really appreciate your support. Another thing that you can do to support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Teamhouse channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go in and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. What's up, everybody?

This is a new episode of Eyes On. We have a special guest today. Bill Gage. Bill was a former Secret Service agent. He, you know, how long were you in the Secret Service, Bill? 12 years. 12 years. 12 years. You've worked over, you've worked 10 State of the Unions. And since the State of the Union, yeah, 0, 3 to 13, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right.

So you've done 10 State of the Unions. And because of the State of the Unions tonight, we want to get a little look at what goes into, like, the security. for the event. And I think, you know, Bill, you'd be a perfect guess for this. Jason, what's up? How are you? What's going on, everybody? It's Jason Lyons, former Marine, former CIA officer. Andy is not with us today. He's all probably tanning in his speedo somewhere, but doing curls. Yeah, exactly. Working on his British accent, we miss Andy. But Bill, it's great to have you. This is my first time meeting you. Nice to meet you.

And, you know, other than it's weird, but the only other Secret Service agent that I know of that I've met was at a hiring event. I was already at the agency. And he was a former, I want to say director of the, it was an African American gentleman. I can't remember his name. He gave me his card and I'll have to find it. But other than that, my exposure to Secret Service, and I'm sure most people, is what you see on TV or what you read in a book. So having you on here will be awesome to get some of the inside scoop.

I know we're focusing primarily on the state of the union, but can you give us a little bit about your background? Yeah, sure. I tell people sometimes I'm just a guy, man. I'm just a guy like when I would go around, especially when Obama got elected because he was so high profile, but I would be at different events backstage, and people would pull you aside and be like,

oh, how did you get this job? Oh, my God. Did they recruit you? I'm like, no, this isn't like the CIA. I wasn't recruited at Princeton or Harvard. I just applied, right? You just apply. So I'm from Virginia, lifelong Virginia. And when I was a little kid, saw the Reagan assassination, saw clips of that and saw

these guys in suits. And I remember asking my dad and my sister, like, who are those guys? And my dad and sister said, oh, it's a secret service. And I just thought that was really cool. So from then on, I just kind of prepped my life, stayed out of trouble. you know, didn't get arrested, didn't snort cocaine, you know, or smoke marijuana. And in 2002, was lucky enough to get hired. It took me a little bit.

It took me about three years to get hired. And then so I got hired. My dad was a career Navy guy. He was enlisted. So I had some exposure to like, you know, paramilitary, that kind of upbringing. And so I loved it in 2000. I started in the Washington Field Office. And from 2002 to 2007, I was in the Washington Field Office.

And the running joke in the Washington Field Office is that the president spends the night there every night. So when he's not traveling, he spends the night. So the Washington Field Office is a very protection-heavy office. Handles probably 75% of the Secret Services Protection assignments, maybe a little bit less than that. But yeah, I worked at National Security Security. case, I got lucky. I was TDIW to headquarters on a national security case for about three years of that. And then in 2007, the Secret Service has a full-time tactical unit called the counter-assault team, pretty historic team. And in 2007, tried out and made it. It's a pretty arduous selection process,

physically demanding, a lot of precise marksmanship. And so made the selection, then made it through the basic course. And from 2007 to 2013, I was on the counter assault team, which provides direct tactical support to the president's detail. And the longer I was on CAT, the more the mission profile expanded. So we were doing sort of small missions with both Obama daughters, with the first lady, with the vice president. Ivan did a lot of stuff.

So I tell people all the time, the most dangerous trips I took were with former president Carter, believe it or not. because he was going to some third world countries with a high threat environment. So, yeah, that's my background really quickly there. Awesome. So I want to jump back real quick to, you said it took you three years after you applied. Is that typical? It was then.

And then it is not now. Everybody's hurting. Every law enforcement agency is hurting for applicants. So now they have an expert I'd process. but I know I look fit, handsome, and intelligent, but I'm not smart at all. And at the time, the service had an exam you had to take called the Treasury enforcement exam,

I think it was called like the TEA, and it had a lot of math, like two trains leave at the same time, one's traveling this speed, the other one, like, when are they going to meet? And it's... I'd be screwed. That's not my game, man. So I did take that test a couple times.

and then, you know, they go all the way back to birth, probably much like your CIA background. They go all the way back to birth. They talk to your old teachers, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it took me about three years. Yeah, I asked because it took me three years from the time that I was, from the time that I hit the button after I was recruited and sent all my stuff in the time I EOD entered on duty.

But for me, it was because I was working for a mobile training company. and we were overseas. So I was in Taiwan for a while. And so I'd have to come back, do some things, go back. And then finally the recruitment center was like, listen, man, we can't do your background while you're overseas. Are you going to stay in the state so fine? I was like, yeah, I cut my contract short. Okay.

All right. Yeah. It takes a while. It takes a while. And I've heard now some of the TSSCI clearances because of all the Snowden stuff and all these issues. issues going on with people leaking stuff that it just, it takes all this Russia stuff, the Russian collusion. I heard some of the TSS stuff takes forever.

Forever. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, man, I did. I was there for 10 state of the unions, like D said. So, and we can get into that. Yeah. Yeah.

So let me just give a little background. So after 9-11, you know, they established DHS, Department of Homeland Security. So Congress passed the law, which established what's called an NSSE, a national special security event, which means a lot of high profile events like the Super Bowl inauguration, state of the union, both political conventions, Republican and Democrat conventions are labeled NSSEs, which just means the whole sort of force of the federal government takes over and organizes the event. takes over and organizes the event. But as part of that legislation, the Secret Service, per the law, is in charge of security of the event. So once it's labeled an NSSE,

if any Secret Service protectees are going to be there, their Secret Service takes over protection. And so the State of the Union, the first one I worked in 2003 was one of the first State of the Union NSSEs. Nice. Yeah, so that was like a huge, I mean, probably,

turned it up to 10 in terms of like resources and yeah you just can't imagine man i mean like every federal agency from the park police to n i h the national institutes of health um i mean uh department of energy like um i mean every government agency wants to be a part of these nses because it helps their funding um you know it helps their profile in some ways it helps recruiting, to be honest. But yeah, every federal government agency gets involved in these things. So now for the NSSEs, I'm sure that you've gone, obviously, state of the union, you know, it's all in the same place. But for other ones, Super Bowl, things like that, is the advance work the same? I guess what I'm getting at is, is it the same heightened awareness that goes into

the planning, or is it kind of like, all right, we've done this before, you know, let's just make sure ABC is in place. So, yeah, so the Secret Service has a protective model. It's actually the best in the world, you know, governments send their different police and security services to the Secret Service to learn this model to train and it's practiced all over the world. But the model kind of stays the same. And then you have to adapt the model to the venue.

So I mentioned the political convention. like Obama's in 2008. I did that one, and Republicans that year, I think was in Minnesota, maybe Minneapolis, I think was in Minnesota, but, you know,

massive venues, like Denver was at, I don't know what it's called now, but it's where the Broncos play. I think it used to be called in BESCO Field. I think it's changed names now, but, you know, massive open air, stadium, lots of security threats.

So the models, stays the same. But just to touch on the advance work, Jason, some of these NSSEs, especially the political conventions, those take about a year to plan. I mean, with full-time advanced teams, like the Secret Service will establish, they'll take special agents, and they're T-Aid for a year. And that's all they're doing is planning. And that's what really sets the Secret Service apart, you know. And for every agent you see on TV around

the president there's 10 or 15 and some hot sweaty kitchen you know um some underground parking garage with exhaust filling up um you know so for every agent you see there there's there's 10 that you don't and then the service really makes their money um on the the the advance right and that's where painstakingly you're planning for every single contingency the advance agents have to know every square inch of the building wall every stairwell where does the stairwell come out how can I get into the event you know all the exits and entrances are covered what's below what's underneath when was the building constructed silly things like are there stairwells pressurized um an event of a fire can you open this door to this

stairwell um what's the highest ladder the local fire department has will it be able to reach eight nine 10 stories um every single and that just takes months and months of place planning and then you bring on the local agencies, right, the local police departments. So the state union, I don't want to say it's easy, but you have federal agencies involved, okay? So, but let's take Denver, Colorado, where Obama's inauguration was, well, now, not only you're doing with all the federal agencies, you've got to do with a whole host of state agencies, so it makes it even more difficult. Wow. Now, does all that planning, does that also involve airspace?

Like, is somebody coordinating FAA? Absolutely. So when I got to the service, they were just spinning up sort of an airspace security branch and they were just spinning it up and the longer I was there, it got more and more robust. A lot of this stuff came out of 9-11

and And just frankly, the government and the Secret Service was kind of unprepared, never really thought of kind of airspace security. So yeah, that's definitely a very robust section now. In fact, when I was, I'd say probably 2010, 2011, they actually, the service embedded an FAA air traffic controller in the Joint Operations Center, which is like the secret. It's called the Jock and Secret Service Lingo, which is the Secret Service Joint Operations Center. Actually had someone from the FAA there who was tied into the FAA, like, the FAA, like, regional center that controls D.C. Okay. And I'm assuming, you know, there's probably military involved in this as well.

Yep, yep, yep. So, and, you know, one of the big, one of, and actually, I got a couple stories here, but one of the big things that came out of 9-11 was, are we going to shoot planes down headed towards like the Capitol or the White House? We're going to shoot them down. And there's a famous story. I don't remember her name, but I think she was a female F-15 or F-16 pilot that took off from D.C. Yeah.

Plain didn't even have missiles. Yeah. Right? Wasn't even armed. And so as part of that, they gave the NORAD commander, whoever is the on-duty commanding officer at NORAD has the authority as well as the Secretary of Defense. And I think the deputy of Secretary of Defense have the authority to shoot a plane down. Hasn't happen, right?

But my first cat assignment in 2007, Christmas of 2007, I had to go down to Waco. And I got a call like December 23rd. Hey, can you fly out tomorrow for Waco? I was like, I guess, sure. So I get on a plane and I'll fly down to Waco. So my mission was I married up with these National Guard helicopter pilots, these Black Hawk pilots. And if there was an airspace intrusion over the president's ranch, we were to, and we were on this like five minute string, man. I mean, we were just like, we were in this, we actually were in this, I guess it was a house, but I was hanging out with all these pilots and crew members.

And we were on like a five or ten minute string that we had to jump on the bird. and we were to intercept the plane. And one of the crew members, I mean, this is really old school, but they were still sorting this crap out. The crew member was to hold up a big whiteboard with the radio channel that the pilot was supposed to turn to. So just to give you the breakdown, so if there's the airspace intrusion, all right,

alert goes off. We would load up on the helicopter. they would pull up next to the plane and they would try to get his attention to turn to the right radio signal and they would hold up a whiteboard. I think since then they've, and I remember talking to a pilot one time

who was telling me what they do now is they actually, the fighter jets will buzz the Cessna, right? They come really close. There's a lot of air sort of disruption. The plane's going to. going all over the place.

They dip their wings and they like basically they get the guy to turn to the right channel. So they've worked that out. But my first cat, that was my first cat, first cat mission. And I remember asking the Black Hawk pilot, I was like, so are we supposed to shoot this down? And he was like, that's your job. So pretty wild. But yeah, sorry for the long winded story. No, no, that's awesome.

I got a question when you were the lead tactical advance for two separate of the state of the unions, what goes into that? I mean, do you guys start planning literally, like after the last Satanity union ends? Yeah, not literally the next day, but it's months and months of planning. There's actually a congressional subcommittee that meets that that, that establishes the NSSEs. And so it's months and months of planning. And so there's a, there's like an SES that control, that's assigned to control that particular NSSE. So like a major secret service supervisor is placed in charge. Okay.

And then each sort of protective section, there'll be like a tactical part. There'll be like a motorcade or transportation part. They'll be like like the actual venue, the actual building, they'll be a part. There's Kim Bio guys. There's, of course, now like computer guys.

control and make sure nobody can hack in and control the lights the fire alarms that kind of thing so i was the lead tactical advance so i was part of the overall advanced team umbrella and so my particular role was to coordinate all the tactical assets so we worked hand in hand mostly with hrt with fbi's hrt and then all of the other federal agencies capital has their own tactical team there's a a couple different local uh when i say local dc's unique because it's a like a federal entity but The Park Police has a SWAT team. There's a DC SWAT team. So just coordinating with all of the different tactical elements,

mainly with HART, but also coordinating with the other SWAT teams there. What's that like, Secret Service and the HRT? Do you guys play nice? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I first got to CAT was the first time we really started working hand in hand with them. It hadn't really been, I don't want to say it wasn't a good relationship. There just was no relationship.

And so in 2008 at the Democratic Convention in Denver was like the first time that we had had those guys embedded with us. And it was the relationship was so new that at that time it was more they were just there to observe because they really, there was no relationship. so they didn't really know what we do, what they did. And it just took off from there. And so we really started working. We had our guys embedded with them. We trained a lot with them and really blossomed that relationship. So coming from an intel guy, you said that you guys start this planning months in advance.

So bringing in outside entities like, you know, local, state police, things like that. are they i'm sure they're given some sort of brief on hey keep this sunda your hat kind of stuff like um do they need some sort of a clearance or anything like that or it's just well it depends well it depends i mean what's your level of access right like what and what's your what's your job and what's your level of access kind of the need to know so part of the problem too is that every agency wants their own operations center so you have like the dc operation center you're going to have like the Department of Energy Operations Center. And so part of the challenge is to have like a combined operation center.

And I remember one of the years, I think I had like four different radios. And I literally had to have like a little sticky. So I would know which one was which because one would talk because we didn't really have, we had some interop capabilities with HRT was easy because we kind of had the same radio system but DC those and we don't want to give

somebody a secret service radio right and not that the DC guys weren't trustworthy it's just that like by chance somehow the radio gets flipped over to the frequency that the president shift is talking on we can't really risk that so

communications is a a big problem as well. And that's one of the things we have to tackle, right, as the lead advance, you've got to tackle that. All right, how are we going to talk to the DC SWAT team? How are we going to talk to the capital SWAT team? So, and one of the things we did on CAT was developing that relationship with HRT because they're the response unit that's going to come in if something happens. And so we would embed an HRT guy with us who then, you know, we called it an L&O, like a liaison officer. And then it was much easier that way with comms.

Cool. Makes sense. Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. We would really appreciate it if you guys went and reviewed us on Apple or Spotify. Those reviews really help people find the podcast and help it get recognized. And, you know, if you've been enjoying the show, we really appreciate your support.

Another thing that you can do to support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Teamhouse channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house.

it's always a uh for lack of a better term a shit show it's just corraling it you know corralling all herding all the cats that's right that's right so uh i'm looking at my notes here and i see uh something about an octagon program now i know that it's something that you can't go into in detail but are you able to give any sort of well so that's a classified program but there's been there's been some writing about it some open source so i'll just comment on some of the open source stuff. But that's a program that the government established just around the time of the Cold War.

And all it means is the lines of succession. Who's in line of succession? If something happens to the president, vice president, we have to have, you know, a transition of power if something were to happen. And so the program was established in the Cold War. And then really a lot of things changed after 9-11, right? formation of DHS, a lot of government planning really showed some vulnerabilities.

So like I knew a guy. So the Octanac program was activated on 9-11, on 2001, right? So I knew a guy that had to go. Actually, I talked to a couple guys in my career that had to go secure different government officials during 9-11. So the list goes like president, vice president speaker, house and then it goes down each department head and it's based on the year the department was founded so number 15 on that list is the secretary of education believe it or not and i knew i knew some guys that at the time on

nine 11 the secretary of education was giving a speech in california and they were like hey you got to go secure this guy and get him get him to a safe place and he was like literally on stage and they had to go be like hey you got to come with us so that's the octagon program and the the secret service i think it's changed since then. I had read recently some articles that came out during COVID. The Octagon programs, there's even further programs that came out during COVID. If the government was totally disabled through sickness or death or a major terrorist attack, they've enhanced it even further. But it basically is the line of succession. Who are they and where are they?

So in the Secret Service Command Post, they have like a, not a telepromp, but they have a screen where every member of the government that's in the line of succession where they are at any time. And it changes like literally by the minute. That's awesome. Yeah, I used to watch. There was a show. I don't know if you guys have seen it. Designated Survivor. Yeah, I've seen that.

I was on. My wife loved that show. Yeah. So this is what that happens. So like night of the state of the union, there's one poor schmuck that's like. puts like in someone's basement. Yeah. Just in case that, you know, the unimaginable happens.

That's right. That's right. And a member of Congress. They, one member of Congress, I believe is randomly selected. It can't be the leadership. It can't be the Speaker of the House or the Senate pro tempore.

It's got to be like it's probably third district of Idaho or something. I got some jokes I can make right now, but I'm not going to do it. So, yeah. So one member of Congress and then a member of the, of the administration, a department head is...

So what happens there when, like, if it does, let's say the capital blows up, everyone's gone. Who's the president, the member of cabinet member first? And then the member of... So are you saying, like, there's no survivors at the Capitol?

Correct. So, I mean, it depends on who that member of Congress is. Okay. And then what department head did they pick to watch it. So I wasn't read into that program. Like I didn't manage it. That was handled by the Secret Service Intelligence Division. Now it's called PID Protective Intelligence.

But I knew about it. So I don't want to speak on what would happen. Yeah, yeah. But just what I know of the program, it would just depend on who the member of Congress was. Who is top? And I think it's changed now because now after COVID or during COVID, they had written some even further plans.

There's actually different combatant commanders that would take over, whether it's MDW, which is military district of Washington, there's different combatant commanders around that are actually on the list now. Oh, wow. I can't see that going wrong at all. No, not at all, right?

Yeah, you got a member of Congress screaming, the Secretary of Agriculture screaming, like, no, I'm the president. I'm the president. And I would assume that, I think like the show, if I remember it. This would be a temporary thing until elections can be held in some sort of formal government. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly right.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And just to circle back, like, again, everybody sees the agents around the president, but they don't see all of this legwork, right? Like, you know, there's a Secret Service agent, you know, running that Octagon program. So it just speaks to the professionals of the agency. and, you know, hasn't always done things perfectly, but for the most part, gets it right and a super professional outfit. I want to touch on the story.

You told me yesterday when we were on the phone. And no, no, no shade on Marines. Lies. But there was, there was an incident that happened during the state of the union with a bunch of Marines and a Patriot missile battery on top of the State Department. Yeah. So the last state of the union that I was the, lead tactical advance for months and months of planning,

painstaking meetings with all these different entities. You know, like HRT was super easy to work with. We loved those guys who trained in a month ago. So that was easy. The other agency's painstaking. I mean, just meeting after meeting after meeting. And I think I told you, Dee, like the mission creep or what I call the commander's creep, right? where it's like the commander thinks like,

oh, these idiots don't know what to do. I know what to do. And so the night before the state of the union, I had a co-tactical advance. Like we kind of worked together. He was on cat. We both worked together. So it was a team of us.

He called me and said, hey, we got a problem. We got to deal with. And I was like, what? And he said, well, the MDW commander thought it would be a good idea to put a squad of Marines. on top of the State Department with some missiles to have an anti-air capability. And you're just like, what?

What? How long have they been up there? And he's like, yeah, they've been camped out for like three days. And we're like, who authorized this? We don't have any comms with those guys. And who is the trigger guy? Who's saying like, yeah, you can shoot down that 747 landing at Reagan or whatever, right? like so that was like a hard no and so now we have to and because we're civilian their military

I mean now we have to do this and this is he calls me at probably like six o'clock at night the night before so now we've got to make phone calls phone calls and emails have to go all the way up to the commander of mdw to argue you can't do that man and these poor marines had been on the roof of the state department for like two days and I I forget how we found out. I think somebody at the State Department just randomly called and said, hey, do you know anything about these Marines? And I don't know if you guys have been to the State Department,

but the roof, and it's really close to everything in D.C. It's beautiful. And so it gives a commanding view of the whole mall and everything. And so had the State Department not called us to say, do you know anything about the squad of Marines would have been up there during the State of the Union, you know, shouldn't some poor 19 year old kit right so um i mean i'm sure they had a plan in place but they had no business that the commander md die had no business i i shouldn't say that what i should

say is that that should have been discussed in all of our tabletop yeah yeah um you know maybe it's a good idea maybe it's not but like let's talk about it first and let's work out all the contingencies before we just do that without asking that's insane oh my god so when you uh when you're doing your advanced work, I'm sure that part of it is any type of threat from the 30,000 foot all the way down to that, you know, man or woman that keeps sending the crazy emails. So do you have agents who will, if someone is a possible threat, do you go have somebody that goes out and speaks to them before you again? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's the service that all came out of the Kennedy assassination where their service stood up. It's called Protect, Protect,

Intelligent, I mentioned earlier, the PID, very, very robust. They have CIA NSA are embedded there in the Protective Intelligence Division, very robust. And yeah, and they rank the threats, right? So if there's an issue and it comes in and the person's rated as like a really high threat, absolutely the agents are going to go knock on their door. And what's up? what are you doing? You know, and so there's a, there's a procedure.

I really kind of minimize by saying what's up, but the service has a procedure that they follow. As far as like dealing with these threats, there's a whole host of questions like, you know, mental illness. What is it? Are they on medication? Are they seeing a doctor?

Do they have means intent, opportunity, right? Or is it just idle talk? So yeah, they absolutely go out. What happens if it's idle talk? They're like, all right, see you. Yeah. I mean, free speech, right? So if the Secret Service determines that it's just idle talk, they don't have the means

intended. It's still a crime. It's against the law to threaten the president. So they may be criminally charged, depending on the nature of the threat. But if it's determined, it's not a violation of the law. And it's just idle talk. Yeah. They just like, hey, knock it off, have a good day.

And I'm really like minimizing that. But some of these investigations take weeks. Some of these protect them until they take weeks. Yeah. So getting away from here in the States, protective details, what's it like working overseas and working with foreign, you know, law enforcement, intelligence, protective services? Very, very difficult because you have no authority whatsoever.

I can remember working with like a gun barred from the embassy that, I had never shot, you know, just given some old rusty M4 with iron sights. That's how they do it? Not always. Not always. I was going to say. You know, the U.S. has no authority in these countries. And sometimes you have to get like a weapon, you have to get weapons permits, weapons

clearances. And so there were times that I didn't have my own assigned weapon. I would have like, like I said, some old dust covered embassy that I'd have to break down and like oil and stuff the night before and um that's just the way it was now sometimes we would be able uh smuggling's a bad word but um we would be able to get our weapons in um on the plane on the military plane we would fly in gotcha so now taking the everything you told us about the state of the union the prep that goes into and all that uh when you flip that overseas like the equivalent of something like that overseas.

All that planning that's done, obviously you guys have a part in it, but you don't have the say in it, correct? That's right. That's right. That's right. And a lot of that's worked out by the staff and the State Department. And there's some no-goes, right? The Secret Service will have some no-goes.

We're not, you know, we're not going to let the president do this open-air, you know, event with like 90,000 Iraqi. or whatever, you know, you want to come up with. There's some no-goes for the service, but a lot of that's worked out by the staff and the State Department, and then the service has their input, and maybe they can adjust the security plan a little bit to make it safer. But at the end of the day,

the service has to do with what they're given, because we're there to protect the president's, and it's the president's decision to do these trips or do these talks. Gotcha. And along those lines, you talk about no-goes, Does that include the president himself and his family and staff? Like there's certain things that they know not to demand or ask or, you know, routes, hey, let's take, just stop here, even though it's not on the plan or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

That, again, the staff works all that out and has discussions with them. But they're aware of some of the no-goes. Like, but there are other times where it's like, hey, we're doing this and the service just does the best they can. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. Do you got anything?

Like any final thoughts in terms of the state of the union? Like how many folks go into it in terms of like secure in the capital and stuff like that during the state of you and even leading up to it? Just from the Secret Service side. All in. Oh, geez, man. I mean, you're talking thousands, thousands. And when you start breaking down like, you know, the Kim Bios stuff, I mean, they're just teams of Kim Bios. bio, the FBI has their own team.

Department of Energy has their own team. You know, when you just talk about the thousands of uniformed officers blocking off streets. And the capital is a massive place, man, huge, with miles of underground tunnels. And all of those have got to be secured. And there's, you know, a main escape route, a backup to that, a backup to that, a back up to that. And some of these tunnels just dump out to random streets.

And like those have got to be secured and you have to have emergency motorcades all over the place. And, you know, it's super difficult too because some of those people are in the line of succession, right? At the Capitol, if there's an incident, Capitol police has to have their own emergency motorcades and stuff. So it gets even more complicated. And, you know, like, I mean, there's like Kimbio detectors. The last state of the union that I did in 2012 was the first time we had a drone, just a certain circling back to the mission creep. At the last minute, Customs said,

hey, we want to have a drone shadow the motorcade. We got this new thing. We're trying to try out a drone, right? Think about how far technology's come now. I mean, you get a drone like this big, right? But yeah, so now the Secret Service has stood up their own drone. So you have drones. It's massive, man, the response.

Can I ask you about like customs? They hit you up and like, we got this new drone. Can we use it for the state of the union? Yeah, yeah. And you guys are like, okay? Well, we could, one, it happened at the last minute. Right. And we couldn't really, at this point, because I literally think it was we're about to depart either the capital or the vice president's residence.

And my God, that's very last minute. If I remember right, it was last minute. And the supervisor handed me the screen and was like, hey, man, this just came down. You know what? It's too late to F with it. Just do it. Don't crash it. Yeah.

And I really shouldn't use. a Bible. This is a Bible giving him on a graduated VMI. But I literally was handled this screen. It was this big and this thick. And it was this like black and white drone feed. And I was like, this thing is crap. Like you couldn't see anything. And so look how far technologies come. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The CIA is not giving customs. They're good shit. Yeah. So. And like I said, it was last minute. And we were just like, you know what at this point. So. we just we had guys get off the roof of the state department right with missiles so what's a drone going to hurt yeah fair absolutely well bill i know i got one more question about um when you were on a cat team you guys were using uh the m4s and you were there during like you know while the transition happened to the hk 416 yeah yeah we were talking about that so the secret service had uh each guy on cat had a sort of customized knights armament which is a a a a specialized firearms company down in Florida, and they were transitioning right as I was leaving to the 416. But huge debate, man, on the 416. You know, the M4 platform has been around since essentially, I think right at the end of the Korean War, like pre-Vietnam or right as Vietnam was cooking off.

And so, yeah, there were some delays in getting the 416. H.RT was already using them. Obviously, some of the tier one units were already using it, but the service was just super old school. I think they finally transitioned over. And I don't know how much you guys know about the H&K 416 platform. It's like a piston driven, so the gun stays clean. But the service was claiming it wasn't, at the time,

the service was claiming it wasn't a reliable weapon. Believe it or not, some of the old school firearms guys in the service were saying that it wasn't a reliable weapon. They've since transitioned over fully to the 416. Nice. Very nice. So, Bill, I know that you currently, you're working with a private security company. Is that right? Yeah, yeah.

Safe haven security out of Arkansas. And it's run by Doug Elms, great guy. And just started working with them last year. We've been covering some high profile controversial figures, keeping them safe. And a great company out of Arkansas. I really enjoy my time working with them. That's awesome. Yeah, you can check it out.

We'll have a link in the description and in the show notes so you can check out the company. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Any more questions? No, I think.

That's great. You're going to be hitting you up offline. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. I had a good time, guys. Awesome. Thanks, Bill.

Just a reminder for everybody, don't forget to like, subscribe. If you're listening to us on Apple or Spotify, rate and review us five stars, it helps big time. Check out the Patreon. on patreon.com slash the teamhouse. Don't forget to check out Bill's company. The link will be in the description. What's the name again, Bill?

Safe haven security. Safe haven security. Check it out. It's in the link. The link is in the bio or in the description. So yeah, we'll see you on the next one. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Bill.

Thanks, guys.