PC police 'inviting disaster' at Secret Service

President Obama signing in former Secret Service Director Julia Pierson

A former Secret Service agent has blasted the influence of political correctness in the presidential protection detail, asserting lower standards put in place for qualification of female agents are "inviting disaster for the president."

Dan Bongino, author of "Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away from It All," was discussing recent breaches of White House security on Sunday's "Aaron Klein Investigative Radio" on New York’s AM 970 The Answer.

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Bongino, a former member of Presidents Bush and Obama's security detail and instructor at the Secret Service's training academy, called recent security lapses – including a fence jumper who penetrated the White House on Sept. 19 and a contractor who carried a gun on an elevator with the president himself only three days earlier – "unforgivable."

"These are clear lapses, and I don't think anybody should try to put lipstick on it," Bongino said.

Radio host Aaron Klein pointed out that the fence jumper actually overpowered a female member of the Secret Service on his way into the White House, a point later scrubbed from both the New York Times and Washington Post account of the incident. Klein asked Bongino if lower standards of physical fitness for female applicants may harm security efforts around the president.

"That happens throughout the government: The physical fitness requirements, they're scaled for sex and age," Bongino confirmed. "The point is valid; I don't think it's controversial at all. The sad thing is, Aaron, it's only controversial in the media. It's really not controversial to straight-thinking folks. Bad guys don't care about your sex or age or anything; all they care about is death and destruction."

Bongino said the requirements for securing against such "bad guys" should be a "non-partisan, non-PC issue."

"There should be one set of requirements," Bongino said, "physical standards that have to be met to stop and mitigate an attacker, and that's it.

"In our military, if you're going to enter a SEAL program or a Delta or an Army Ranger program, it's expected that you're able to shoot and do this amount of physical work in this amount of time," Bongino continued. "Why the Secret Service feels the need to do otherwise, my guess is that they're afraid of lawsuits. But I agree with you, it's just silly to scale this stuff, and you're inviting disaster for the president."

Listen to the full context of Bongino's interview with Klein below:

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