The Fight Read online

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  This book is dedicated to my wife, Paula, and my daughters Isabel and Amelia. Your love and support have made every day a gift, and every moment the beginning of a new adventure.

  This is a true story, though some names and details have been changed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If one’s life is measured by the impact that they have had on the lives of others, then the value of the lives of the people I want to acknowledge here are immeasurable. My wife Paula grew up on the tough streets of Cali, Colombia, and came to the United States as a child. She overcame a series of obstacles, which have broken the souls of many others, and became a successful business woman, an incredibly dedicated mother, and an inspiration to me during those times where I questioned everything. This book is dedicated to Paula and to my two daughters, Isabel and Amelia, because, without their love and support, there would be no story to tell and no passion to tell it with.

  I would also like to thank Senator Mike Lee, Senator Rand Paul, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, Congressman Louie Gohmert, and former Congressman Allen West for believing in me when I needed support in my fight for a better tomorrow. There are some good men and women left in politics and these individuals are proof of that.

  Thank you to Sean Hannity, and to Lynda, Lauren, and Jason, from the Sean Hannity radio show team, for making this story, and this book possible. Lynda selflessly returned our call and lent a hand when we needed a break, and Lynda and Lauren always seemed to know when I needed a supportive message during a stressful time. And thank you Sean for giving me a chance to be heard by millions on your show. Thank you to Mark Levin and Rich from the Mark Levin radio show for constantly supporting me and being there for me when I needed it. Mark is a true believer in the cause and his passion serves as a daily reminder of what’s at stake in this fight. Thank you to Glenn Beck for being a friend when I needed careful advice on how to best fight the good fight. It was your show covering Hayek that motivated me to change direction.

  Finally, I would like to thank my campaign team led by Sharon Strine, Maria Pycha, Ally McMahon, Phil Reboli, Jan Schultz, Jerry DeWolf, and Diana Umstot. They refused to quit when the odds were stacked against us, and organized the many dedicated volunteers who selflessly gave their time and energy to join the fight. Dave, Ric, Jeff, Sara, Skip, Kat, Bob, Lisa, Jon, Josh, Missy, Eric, Mary Jane, Sean, Leigh, Dylan, Betsy, and to the many others who helped, I will never forget your efforts.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “Why should I care about what a former Secret Service agent and former political candidate has to say about governing, leadership, or anything else?” If you picked up this book out of curiosity and are asking yourself that question, then I understand. I understand your hesitancy because I am a born skeptic with a penchant for questioning nearly everything. My first car was a white Ford Escort and the first bumper sticker I placed on that car read, “Question Authority.” As you read the book, I ask that you never relinquish your skepticism and that you remember why I chose to write this book. I chose to write the book because some of the best sports coaches were not the most naturally gifted players. Many of these talented and creative coaches were mediocre players who overcame poor genetics, a lack of access to the best training resources, and even poor nutrition and family circumstances, to make it onto the stage with the most elite athletes in the world. They may not have been the star of the team. They may not have been chosen for the lead role in the play. They may not have been chosen as the solo vocalist in the choir. But they overcame a host of challenges and difficulties, and worked their minds and bodies to their limits to earn their spot on that stage.

  Growing up at the lower end of the middle class, in a small apartment, above my grandfather’s bar on Myrtle Avenue in Queens, New York, I never envisioned a future where I would be a Secret Service agent standing next to the President of the United States and being responsible for ensuring that he is never harmed. I never envisioned becoming the Republican Party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate, or running for the U.S. Congress as a largely unknown Republican, in a strongly Democratic state and district, against one of the wealthiest and most popular members of Congress, and coming within one point of defeating him. But I didn’t defeat him. I lost. That loss hurt deeply, but I made it on that stage and after leaving that stage I began to think about the path that led me there and how my failures could assist others in getting to that same stage. Maybe some of the lessons I learned will help them become the soloist in the choir that I never was.

  I questioned everything after that tough political loss, but after a long period of introspection I found the elusive answer I had sought. Life’s journey is a complicated one with a number of twists and turns, some in your control and some not and I had mistakenly believed that the outcome of my journey, not the journey itself, was all that mattered. My political loss, along with many of my experiences as a Secret Service special agent, were a reflection of a deeper truth, which cannot be distilled down to the result of my effort. I realized after the devastating political loss that the result is important, but it is the fight that really matters. Life’s challenges are a series of fights and the effort you choose to put into them. Some of these fights will be in vain and some will result in tremendous successes, but the character you build and your individual willingness to sacrifice for “the team” (a concept I will discuss in-depth later in the book) is what you will be remembered for. The legacy you leave others with is not simply the result of your work, but the invaluable lessons you can teach others by the simple act of pouring all of your efforts and energy into a cause you believe in. The result of your efforts, whether it be an election victory in politics, a successful Secret Service security advance, or a completed work project, may have provided you with a deliverable to your fellow man that has marginally improved the world as we know it, but the blood, sweat, and tears that you poured into that effort, regardless of the outcome of it, will be an example to many others who can spread it and cause a chain reaction of hope and optimism.

  I wrote The Fight to document my successes in the Secret Service and my failures in politics. Both of these experiences provided invaluable templates for a better path forward. The Secret Service, despite some of its recent negative headlines, is a unique operation where special things happen. The special agents I had the honor of serving with didn’t care much about the money or the glory; they only cared about the mission. The agents and their families made enormous sacrifices to ensure that the President of the United States was never harmed on their watch. How did a government, so associated with models of ineptitude and failure, spawn an agency where the opposite occurs? I’ll tell you later in this book. Why is most of our elected government full of people who entered politics for the right reasons, but left without their souls? I’ll try to answer that one as well. My hope is that this public airing of my failures and successes will provide some lessons to help you in “the fight” because, in the end, the fight is wha
t really matters.

  INTRODUCTION

  There Are No Silver Medals in Politics

  “Win or lose, Republican Dan Bongino has positioned himself as a rising star in the Maryland GOP with an unexpectedly close contest against well-heeled incumbent John Delaney.”1 This was the text that ran underneath a photo of me and my team in The Baltimore Sun on November 5, 2014, the day after election day. The congressional campaign my family and I had dedicated our lives to for nearly two years was now over. There were no more doors to be knocked on, get-out-the-vote phone calls to be made, parades or county fairs to attend, or speeches to be given. It was all over. I had left every ounce of spiritual and physical energy I had on the political field of play and, despite running against a well-liked and well-funded incumbent who had defeated an incumbent Republican congressman just two years earlier by over twenty points, in a deep blue state, and being dramatically outspent, the race was so close that it was going to be decided by the absentee ballot count over the course of the following days.

  Just a few hours earlier, as the clock ticked past the midnight hour, I was tearing up while looking at my wife, Paula, my father, and my mother-in-law, as they joined me in the buzzing hotel conference room we had rented as a campaign night war room. I was overwhelmed by emotion as I was closing in on a dramatic political upset that absolutely no one saw coming. Among the sea of pats on the back from excited supporters and the volunteers glued to computer screens as they anxiously hit the ENTER button on their computers to refresh the Maryland State Board of Elections results page, was my wife, Paula, standing over me as I sat in front of the computer that had just displayed us in the lead by thousands of votes. Thinking that the lead I had taken was nearly insurmountable at this point, with more than 90 percent of the polling precincts reporting results, even the skeptics in the room began to believe that the impossible may happen. Seeing the incredible sense of pride in my father’s eyes and in the eyes of my mother-in-law, who had come to this country from Colombia decades ago with nothing but a dream in her pocket, as we closed in on a victory in the race for Congress in Maryland’s sixth congressional district, was emotionally too much to take after a long two years of emotional highs and lows, and the tears were difficult to hold back.

  Not one mainstream political prognosticator had rated the congressional race I chose to enter into as anything other than “Safe Democratic.” When you are the Republican running in that race, this is never a good sign. Compounding the problem was that the local media outlets had ignored our pleas for fair campaign press coverage of the excitement we were generating within the state. The preordained media outcome in the race was so striking that just four days before the election The Washington Post’s Arelis Hernandez declared, in the headline of her piece on the larger Maryland political picture, “In Maryland’s eight congressional races, incumbents face little competition.”2 Despite these headwinds pushing against our campaign’s sails we executed a well-designed campaign plan that I knew would give us a chance, albeit a small one, at victory.

  When the polls closed late in the evening, the Maryland State Board of Elections reported the results of early voting within minutes and the results were devastating. Early voting results in Maryland are a generally reliable indicator of how the election is going to go and Congressman Delaney was ahead by double digits. The look on Paula’s face, as she walked back into the room from putting our two-year-old daughter down to sleep in the hotel room and looked at the computer screen, was a mix of breathtaking disappointment and anxiety. She was wondering the same thing I was: “How were we going to tell the hundreds of excited supporters who had gathered in the hotel that we were going to lose badly?” We were both more concerned with their feelings of disappointment than ours because they had all poured their time and energy into the campaign effort. I looked around the room and, as my eyes met the eyes of volunteers and supporters who I had developed personal relationships with as we spent hours knocking on doors and discussing everything from sports to philosophy, it became more and more difficult to disguise my disappointment.

  As the early polling precincts began to report their results from the heavily Democratic Washington, DC, suburbs, Congressman Delaney’s lead grew and I began to worry that all of the more than seven thousand doors I had personally knocked on during the campaign had amounted to nothing. Were the political prognosticators correct and had I grossly misjudged my ability to politically persuade people? I knew that the race was a formidable political hill to climb, but I didn’t expect a double-digit loss and wasn’t even prepared to deliver a concession speech under those circumstances. I penciled a few notes on a napkin nearby and they all followed the same theme: how sorry I was for letting everyone down. Ironically, as Paula looked at me and quietly said, “All that work, and we’re left with this,” more results came in from the western and mountain portions of the district and that double-digit lead began to drop. Hours had now passed and the excitement in the packed war room began to grow. We had rented a number of rooms in the hotel for the event—a conference room with some food, a room for my family, and a small ballroom decorated appropriately for either a concession or victory speech—but everyone was packed tightly into the small war room and the hallway outside looking both into the room and over computers and the volunteers’ shoulders for updated results.

  At around eleven o’clock at night it happened, although I was skeptical. My friend Brian Terriberry, who had accompanied me throughout the day, forcefully poked me on my shoulder and shoved his cell in my face. On his screen was an Associated Press elections tracker that showed me in the lead by two points. When I looked around the small room and hallway and noticed that hundreds of people were staring at device screens hitting the REFRESH button, all on the same wireless connection, it all made sense. Brian’s smartphone must have been the first device to get the new results and the other computers, including mine were slow to catch up due to the heavy Web traffic. At this point, it began to sink in that we had taken the lead in the race. The mixed martial arts practitioner in me burst out, and in a fit of joy I punched down on the table in front of me in pure joy. Everyone in the room looked surprised and confused, wondering if this was rage or joy. When I screamed, “We’re winning,” the mood turned instantly from nervous anxiety to a blanket of joy so thick with pent-up emotion that you could almost touch it. My Twitter account began to overflow with well-wishes from supporters and astonishment from political insiders who couldn’t believe that we were ahead in a race they had all written off as unwinnable for me. One of the more humorous tweets I saw, from an account using the handle @EsotericCD read: “I seriously don’t understand how it’s possible that Dan Bongino (R) is beating John Delaney (D) in MD06. And yet it’s happening. #crazypills.”

  At 12:30 a.m., with 86 percent of the votes in, and my lead at just under 3 percent, I grabbed my campaign manager, Sharon, and said to her, “If we pull this off, I need five minutes.” I wanted to be sure that after my wife and I had an opportunity to digest this moment that I didn’t forget the architect and engineer of the campaign plan that was making this race a nail-biter, against all the odds. I then grabbed my wife, who was standing to the left of the seat I hadn’t left in hours and tightly grabbed her around the waist. It was her innumerable sacrifices that had made that moment possible however fleeting it turned out to be in the end. No one ever prepares the spouses of political candidates for the rigors of a hard-fought campaign and she had never left my side. Although I was overjoyed and new rounds of eye contact with supporters were met by tears and smiles from ear to ear, I noticed that Dylan and Leigh from my campaign team, who had been huddled next to me the entire night doing the tedious electoral math, were not sharing in the moment. Dylan let me enjoy the next few glances and smiles, but then told me the troubling news. He said that the few remaining polling precincts left were largely from the heavily Democratic portions of the district and he wasn’t sure that our lead would hold. The minutes passed excruciatingly
slowly as the final votes arrived at the State Board of Elections and were input into the system for the world to see. As those minutes passed and Dylan, Leigh, and I scrambled to calculate the voting math, the results came in before the pencils could process the calculations. We had an erasable SMART Board behind me, which we constantly updated. Phil and Sara, from my campaign team, stole glances at my computer from over my shoulder and updated it from us leading by two thousand votes, to up by a couple of hundred votes, to up by seventy-one votes, to down by seventy-one votes, to down by a couple of hundred votes before the stream of incoming results slowed down. Paula and I were crushed and everyone in the room knew it. It was as if a super-powered emotional vacuum had just sucked all of the positive energy out of the room. The foil of being overcome with joy at our unexpected potential victory and then in minutes having it all ripped away as the final few polling precincts came in, made the experience far worse. I knew there were thousands of absentee and provisional ballots outstanding and if the vote deficit remained within a few hundred votes, we still had a great chance at victory. But as the final precincts came in, we fell behind by a slim thousand-plus votes. The only question remaining, after the most draining emotional roller-coaster ride I had been on since my days in hot zones in the Secret Service, was: “Were there enough outstanding absentee votes from the heavily Republican portions of the district to catch up?”

  I owed my supporters who had been packed into that small, hot room for most of the night an update. They had watched me sitting in that chair for hours smiling, crying, laughing, frowning, joyous, angry, frustrated, and finally beaten, and they were owed an explanation. I thanked them profusely and told them it was not going to be decided tonight and that it was probably best that we all went home and prepared for an absentee ballot count, which could take days. I couldn’t escape the thought that the emotionally drained and ill version of me that they were seeing would be the last image of me that would be with them. It’s still this memory of that night that haunts me the most.