Some Secret Service agents seem to be easily bought off after they leave the taxpayers' employment. Dan Bongino, failed Congressional candidate in Maryland who now headed to Florida to try again is one.
The newest inductee is former uniformed Secret Service agent Gary Byrne, who wrote the book because he believes “[his] obligation today is to raise my voice, to help safeguard the presidency from Bill and Hillary Clinton.”
In other words, he is there to slander a former President and First Lady who is now candidate for President because his politics dictate it. Just so we understand the playing field. It's taken him ten years since he left the Secret Service to swallow hard and come clean.
Byrne appeared on Fox News this morning to repeat his two central claims: That Hillary threw a vase at then-President Clinton and gave him a black eye.
This is all they've got? An unsubstantiated claim? Which is why Byrne had to ramp it up this morning.
“There was this guideline where she didn’t want to see [White House staff],” Byrne opined. “My experience with them is they don’t like the military and they don’t like law enforcement.”
“And my personal feeling based on what I saw is she does not like men,” he added.
Ooooh, Fox code for "secret lesbian," amirite?
Here's the problem. This guy wasn't close enough to Bill and Hillary Clinton to know any of this. Not only that, but this book, like Bongino's, is just an excuse to bathe political adversaries in right-wing smears for a few pages, to be lapped up by anxious conservative haters who dine on nightly meals of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.
The Association of Former Agents of the United States Secret Service (AFAUSSS) roundly denounced Byrne's claims and debunked them for Politico earlier this month. Further, they denounced the effort as one that undermines the necessary trust between Secret Service agents and the people they protect.
“There is no place for any self-moralizing narratives, particularly those with an underlying motive,” reads the statement from the group’s board of directors, which says Byrne has politics and profit on his mind.
They were even more forceful about the chances Byrne had actually witnessed such things, observing that his detail wouldn't have been anywhere near the Clintons during these so-called "episodes."
People familiar with West Wing security laugh at the idea that Byrne or any uniformed officer ever would have walked in on Bill Clinton anywhere, whether in a meeting or, as a New York Post article over the weekend claims, in the middle of a make-out session in the Map Room with the late daughter of former Vice President Walter Mondale. The Secret Service presidential detail would have stopped him. (That affair was a well-worn rumor during the Clinton years, though strongly denied by Eleanor Mondale, who died of brain cancer in 2011.)
“The inner perimeter is 100 percent controlled by the presidential protective division,” said a former supervisor of the presidential protective division, who asked not to be identified by name.
This squares with analysis that Byrne's own sworn testimony doesn't line up with what he wrote in his book -- an inconsistency he hasn't been able to explain.
As Media Matters observes, Byrne's posture as a whistleblower is laughable, and if anyone should know that, it's David Brock. Brock, you may recall, was paid a lot of money by the vast right-wing conspiracy to write smear books about the Clintons before he realized writing fiction as though it was fact wasn't good for the country or his conscience.
But that won't stop Fox News from putting him on the air. His viewers need their daily serving of haterade in order to stick with Drumpf.
