>> no matter where you're from or stand on the issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. if it happens here or here or anywhere, america is powered. >> our panelist and the "washington post" we are thrilled to have her here today and i want to read a very brief bio. but the "washington post" since 2000 and reported the enquirer

and last but not least as a former college newspaper wanted to pay tribute to that. [applause] she won the 2015 pulitzer prize among many other accolades for her work on misconduct, which we will be discussing today and in addition to this book the rise and fall of the secret service, we will be discussing she's also written two other books and also i alone canum fix it, the catastrophic final year of the pandemic we've been living through for theso past two years

so please give her a warm welcome. [applause] thank you for being here today. your book captures the issues inside the secret service asge well as the individual heroism of agents when lives are on the line. it's a rich topic for discussion and i wanted to start by asking having covered the secret service since 2012, when did you think this would be such a rich topic of discussion for a book? >> i am so delighted i'm being questioned by a lawyer that used to be a journalist. nli grew up in a family of lawys and i'm the only one that took this at the time on lucrative

bath. it turned out. i have a lot of respect for lawyers and i'm grateful to you for mentioning because they wouldn't have been a journalist of the editor of the paper at f the time hadn't sort of grabbd me by the scuff of my neck to writeor a story about somethingi will tell you about later but captivated me about what you can find when you start to dig and half time. to answer the question on the table, this is a funny story and i'm not normally viewed as very funny in my delivery. so the funny story is like all great reporting threads and investigative reporting threats this lifelong obsession with of

the secret service began by accident. i have a voice that's either like a big sister or friendly friend. i am trustworthy but have been a beneficiary of sounding trustworthy. [laughter] so when there was this insane and at the time considered the most humiliating episode in history in 2012 a dozen agents we find out are being flown back unceremoniously in columbia. my great investigative reporting partner said we have a lot of agents we have to call and a lot

of people to find out how this happened. these agents were flown back because they were caught with guns and plans in their hotel room drunk off their butts and with prostitutes during a time when they were supposed to be preparing and securing the entire citype for president obama's arrival. i get a call from david and the editor saying can you help us out because it's going to involve getting on the phone and convincing a lot of people to tell me what happened. you may be old enough to remember. i'm just going to take a guess the shampoo commercial you tell two friends, two more friends.

these agents basically sense that this woman is calling around and knows what happened and each would essentially tell their other friends she sounds like she wants to get to the bottom of it. this is a really long answer i am so sorry. the thing is agents can lose their jobs for talking to the press. the secret service uses that to blockk agents from talking about things the service doesn't want them to talk about. tyou can talk about any flattering thing, any wonderful memory of a president is fine but talk about the secret service in a way that is unflattering and revelatory that comes back and embarrasses somebody and you can lose your job so i was lucky that they

spoke to me. in this happy accident four of them told me unbelievable things that were so much worse than what happened and chilling because to a person every senior agent that i spoke to was convinced that the president was going to be killed on their watch because the agency was so beleaguered and broken and d dysfunctional and using duct tape to keep it together. nwhen i knew i had a book is whn an agent called me and i don't mean a secret service agent playbook agent and she said i don't know you, but you have a book. she was of the literary agency and i am forever in debt to her because she wouldn't let go of me. i didn't have any desire to

write a book. i was 40, late 40s i will just say and i always wanted to be a journalist. nothing else. but she wouldn't let go and convinced me and i'm so glad that she was the tiger that she was. >> that's a great story and that this book is such a service to us all to get behind this image of the secret servicet that's just these agents in suits very easily to protection unit and in fact not only is it not true of the entire origin of the secret service certainly not what i would have thought. can you tell me more of that? >> it was not a mystery but two pieces of information. i had written a lot about the department of defense and the department of justice, forgive

become of the environmental protection agency, but i never really studied this tiny little protection unit that began in 1865 in the department of treasury.. it's an initial assignment and it was called the secret service because they wereec trying to be undercover and secretive about how they did their work. abraham lincoln and his secretary of treasury had been talking for weeks about the damagingge flood and forged currency that had made up the entire two thirds of the economy at the time and this was really harmful to the united states trying to get back to recover after the civil war. they'd been talking about it in a meeting interestingly the day, hours later lincoln was shot and killed. they had a treasury and cabinet meeting to discuss how can we

control this flood of forgeries and fraudulent dollars? his secretary of treasury proceeded after the idea and months later created this little unit kind of rough and tumble agents almost like revenue if you will. what they did is they found people like mobster gangs that had the same places and they broke up these operations into tried to arrest those engaged in burned. that was their big job. >> this would sounds like there was no horrible protection agencyor for a long time in our history. why do you think that was the case? >> i love the question.

i didn't know this so i learned it in the research for the book but there was intense resistance to the idea of a presidential security team and it was part and parcel of the founding of america, which is it's the people's house. we talk about the capital and the first name for the white house was theer people's house. there were no fences if you can do believe it. people had picnics on the white houseei lawn's and walk their ds and literally rode their horses across the front steps. so the idea of a palace guard was an anathema to americans and american presidents who wanted to feel as though they were projecting the issue of a man of the people. the people's representative and so security was considered just

something from the royals in europe and not something we are going to do here. three presidents would be killed before the country and federal government really woke up and said okay we can't lose anymore presidents this way. you know how lincoln was killed. the third presidential assassination that triggered the formation of the secret service or rather i should say the assignment of this role secret service was mckinley. he was at a world fair 1901 and was shot at close range by a socialist communist who was infuriated by mckinley's administration and the feeling that little people were overlooked andhi mckinley died f his injuries weirdly many, many weeks after the actual event but that was the beginning of secret

service protecting the president. >> and you wrote about how we finally had a formal agency protecting the president from the mckinley assassination up until the kennedy assassination. what was this iteration of the secret service like? >> this period between mckinley and kennedy i would say it was essentially different patrols who would be with the president when he traveled werewolves in public or now so frequently called the rope line. they keep the rope between people and the president will.

itua was a little bit stillessional but security and with the family especially around the time eisenhower, before eisenhower around world war ii there was a more interest having or security guards along with the president's family. >> then president kennedy takes office and is very resistant to having detail around him. can you tell me more about the security challenges? >> kennedy put an incredible strain on the secret service and

i begin the book describing what that was like for the agents that were traveling with him during his campaign for dallas. they were exhausted and he was a jet setting highflying let me touch every voter i can kind of president which was so different and such a culture's shock after his o predecessor who often stad in the white house to travel and wasn't that interested in standing at a rope line and shaking hands all day long. he definitely wanted to be engaged. kennedy was a whole different animal. he set off the people's energy and wanted to be with them and famously said to a senior supervisor ond the presidents

detail he said i wouldn't get elected dog catcher if i listened to you and did what you want. i'm paraphrasing the last part but the dog catcher part is accurate. he feasted on being with people and would flee almost like a runaway he would flee his protectors to get out of them and get closer and throw himself into it and it was infuriating so they are tired from the hours that he's traveling into being with people. they are hopscotch in each other from city to city not catching enought sleep. they areve exhausted by the tral that he is doing, easily triple what his predecessor hadin done and then they are kind of ticked off because he won't listen to the doctor essentially. then of course we all know now

and they knew better than anyone kennedy was flailing his protectors trying to be with women who were not his wife and on a daily basis so that evasion that he was engaged in was also painful for them and i know this isn't really your question but it's important to say this, the agents, and i interviewed almost all of them. sadly many of them have died since my interviews with them and since the book was published but i interviewed almost every single agent on kennedy's detail prior at the time of the utassassination. they were so passionate about their duties to the country. their patriotism was so invested in protecting the president and

they were not judging his morality in large measure. some of them were, but many of them were infuriated because it was their jobob to protect what was happening on the other side of that hotel room door and they couldn't screen the women that were coming in regularly at all hours of the night and leaving at all hours of the night. they were infuriated because you are putting a barrier between them and their ability to serve their country and do their duty. that is what i felt and learned from them. >> and of course we all know the tragic event that this recklessness led to 1963 and i love in the book how you walked through the assassination through the perspective of the

secret service agents. how d do you think having interviewed them and having talked to them do you think there are ways in which the secret service failed to protect president kennedy adequately?ad >> i do sadly. seeven though i think that their sense of duty and mission was so key and palpable, there were ways as individuals they failed. but i think the larger answer to the question is there were wayss in which the agency failed them and didn't give them the tools to do the job in a way that would save the president on that day. one is the director of the secret service who weirdly use to live like a block from where i live now. went to the church at the corner of my block.

sorry i wass about to go that direction. the way the agency failed, secret service, the director had been begging kennedy and the administration to give him more money to hire more agents because he knew how exhausted they were. he asked for an additional i think 36 agents to try to keep their heads above water. i interviewed a lot of their wives. they were literally coming home from an assignment on a nine city tour, dropping their bags sat their wife's front doorstep and w i say wife because the wie would get their clothes washed and put them back a out on the doorstep and they would come back from headquarters and go out that night. so they were really doing triple duty. raleigh couldn't get the kennedy administration to agree to give him the extra agents. there was a lack of training.

none of them really knew what should they do if someone shot at or came at the president with a knife other than the good lawn enforcement training. they didn't have a lot of training and it is the second step count on a gunshot goes off into the president is standing atat a podium or near his car. that the training wasn't there, neither was there ever a consideration which shocks me after i look at some of the internal records of the months and weeks beforere the assassination. there wasn't an effort to try to protect the president from gunfire, from the line of sight. that's a big deal for the secret service. they try to make sure that they block with walls or they built walls to block the line of sight

from the rightful owner of a gun. forgive me. [laughter] i know very little about guns. lee harvey oswald had a clear shot. other people could have had a clear shot that day because the secret service wasn't working very hard to focus on that. you asked the question so well about their own responsibility and the only personal responsibility of some of those agents is that inn ordert to sot of let a off steam at the end of theri night and this was a hardr drinking time in our history, they all went out in fort worth the night before the assassination and trip to dallas to a funny coffee and kind of strip club where the waitresses wore underwear.

the bartenders illegally served straight liquor and put it into juice cups and theyd were there drinking until two, four, 5:00 in the morning. as the head of the commission said in the hearings after the assassination i'm sorry, director,ha you cannot tell me that a man that has been up until two, four, 5:00 in the morning whether he was drunk o r not if he is able to react to protect the president the next morning and that is a fact which is true. >> very unfortunate. it also know very little about guns so just to hop on that train as well. >> someone's going to say carol. [laughter] i also have to ask because

unfortunately the 1960s was a tragic decade with multiple assassinations and of a president and some non-presidents as well and you describe in the book how the assassination of robert kennedy changed the secret service's mission. how did that change the mission? >> such a devastating time and a trial by error, trial by fire. such an awful time in the sense of okay these are presidential candidates running for office. robert kennedy's brother, forgive me, john f. kennedy's brother is one of them. the secret service knows at this juncture before bobby kennedy is killed and shot, they know that the people that want to kill presidents are looking often for

fame and the way to do that is to kill somebody famous or to have such ange incredible, the engagement such a credible violent event. so lyndon johnson is alerted at 2:00 i think in the morning because in los angeles it's nine or 10:00 when the shooting happened. he calls the director and says i want you to put a security security detailson every singlee tonight. people asked me many times have you been to tucson before and

the answer is yes but kindly blow through for work and spend qualityof time experiencing the place but one of the agents i interviewed here just an amazing icon and detailed leader for many years he was the first agentt who was called that night by the director, relatively young and deeply trusted by the director and somebody with good instincts and he said okay, pack a bag, pack a lot. don't know how long you're going to be gone, where you're going or when you're coming home, but you're going to go see this candidate in the neighborhood in washington, d.c. and good luck. bobby was the agents name by the

way. his wife reminded me many times in the interview and at her house he didn't come home for nine months. again, did drop off his laundry. [laughter] but didn't actually sleep in his own bed forever after prominent candidates for president would always get secret service protection. >> after that we should talk about a major success of the secret service in 1981. another turning point for the agency came when they fulfilled the zero failed mission. president reagan was shot outside the dc hotel but survived duet to their heroism. can you tell me more about how that event unfolded?

>> ronald reagan had been president for all of about i want to say six weeks. jerry wasr the leader of the presidential detail but happened really spent any time with reagan shoulder to shoulder. they say you're on the right-hand shouldered of the president when you are the detailed leader but he hadn't been doing that. he had been assigned the deputy leader and decided on this one particular morning in march he needed to spend some time with the boss and get to know him and not just do the paperwork in the office and get out on the road with him. itit wasn't considered a very hh profile event. the president was speaking to a labor union at a local hotel that was less than a mile from the white house and one that i pass all the time on my way to work. presidents had been going there

many times in each of their ten years. it was a standard routine visit. it was raining, foggy and jerry parr decided not to ask reagan to where his bulletproof vest which they often made the president, not made but asked him to where especially on foreign trips and sometimes out of town. it was kind of muggy, that isn't the right word, humid. so he decided not to bring that up. a man who you all know secretly got into an area of news photographers, cameramen cbs, abc and it was an area that hadn't been screened. normally the secret service sort

of paths down and/or checks everybody that's going to get within 100 feet, 100 yards of the president and there was a failure to do that because there was a presumption it's a local job we've done this a million times. the cameramen are over there, as the president emerges from an underground driveway essentially like a walkway walking towards the beast the name for the presidential limo, shots ring out andll john hinckley is all f about 15 feet from the president so he has the ability to kill him. what is wonderful about this episode if you can say anything is wonderful about something so traumatic, gunfire on adc street is that everybody on the presidents detail immediately reacts, instantly with the root

and training they didn't have when kennedy was shot. the training is called attack on the principal. and they drilled if i hear something and i see something, i --in he is able to get off six shots in less than two seconds. not all of them very well aimed, but still. jerry hears it, doesn't look up or turn from his right or left. he just starts shoving the residence towards the open black door of the limousine and they are 3 yards away from it so it'a not easy and according to president reagan in his description of it later, he almost breaks, reagan assumes bhis rib has been broken becaue that's hard. he shoved him into -- it's the

transmission. his chest goes down on that and he is convinced that. another amazing agent, who everybody considered sort of this hulk football player but like a rookie he knows where the gunfire is coming from so he points his chest towards it and throws out his hands as fast as he can and as wide as he can. andwo that. those two men -- is this boring

by the way? do you already know this? [laughter] sometimes i figure you already know this. you can tell by reading the fbi agents interviewing in real time what happened. of course there is great camera footage of it as well and my wonderful calling. it's time and i recommend it to you. rawhide down being his codename in the secret service. but the primary documents of this are breathtaking.

so they get him inoh the car. a bullet is ricocheting and it slices through a part of his lung. behind him, the deputy agent shoves his legs backward so they can shut the door and the driver also ran agent knows he's got a gun to get out of there so they have to flee. they don't know it's going to happen and in his head he's pray please don't let me run over tammy. because he's fallen but they don't know where he is. luckily he doesn't.

tammye, survives. i'm sorry, that is so long and answer. [laughter] i remember reading they didn't initially think they would have to go to the hospital but in fact they had to make a detour. >> i will try to be briefer this time. so in the attack on the principal training he's had combat military hospital, sorry it's something else like a mass training so he notices that reagan was complaining you broke my left, he notices the froth

coming out of his mouth is pink. it's oxygenated and from his training he is saying that is a symptom or clue his lungs are damaged in some ways. something is happening. he feels all around him to find something. he didn't have a lot of timede r a surgeon to see him and determine he had a perforated long and potentially exploding bullet was lodged. i wasn't watching this as a reporter.

a little young for this moment but most of the people in the white house had no idea the president had to have more than half of his blood replaced. that's what happened in the emergency room while they tried to get to the other bullet. >> a story of heroism and another tragic day for the country september 11 the secret service also show incredible heroism but there are key vulnerabilities including for vice president cheney. can you tell me more about that? >> i tried to read the book the

way that my agent proposed it to me. i wanted to write about the current secret service but this agency has had such an arc from rebuilding itself, proving itself when reagan's life was saved and many other times and then it begins a slow demise in the wake which is tragic because every other agency got the toys and tools to rebuild three new century and national security threats. the secret servicece didn't. that day obviously is incredibly poignant and a pivot point for the country in so many ways but

for the secret service, itst revealed how little they imagine they would like to behead our government, destabilize our country and basically knock off the head of that country by killing that president. we all know that the plane that crashedd in shanksville was intended either for the white house or capital based on interviews the fbi conducted they believe it was very likely a tossup but very likely to have been the white house. that day there was a failure to communicate in the white house. the president was in florida at

an education event to remind voters how much he cared about education reform and holding schools accountable. i won't go into some of the mistakes the secret service made the today regarding president bush but with regards to vice president cheney who would have been the president if bush had d been killed that day he was in his office for a meeting and didn't usually go to the oval office for meetings but that day he did.o he a was meeting with a close ay and was watching the television whene the second jet hit the secondnd tower. the secret service, the person in charge of making sure to liaison about any threats to the white house because keep in mind it had been attacked in the air

before. twice planes either crashed there or into the lawn so it's not like that impossible to envision. and agent in charge of liaison with the faa gets a message in the second plane about 9:03. weat are still missing two jets not communicating and heading towards you. there are 20 or 30 minutes out. for some reason this agent sends a career up to the tower of the old executive building where the secretet service has its operations center. a runner goes up there to communicate the message so only

classified as green no one is supposed to know about it we won't talk about much more they only have this much of the picture. the faa has t this picture so ty run up to look and see how many minutes and howat many seconds t nobody communicates to the headquarters we have two incoming planes because you have a protective become a vice president at the white house where the planes are coming. a minute before the incoming plane that crashes into the pentagon buzzes the white house before the detail leader breaks into his office and says we've got to go and literally wastes

himth down the stairwell into te underground bunker. another failure of imaginationay that day, nobody thought we will have to rush the vice president of theun underground bunker to prepare for a plane to hit the white house. the agents who were with him do not have this classified key to instantly get him inside of the bunker and they have to wait in the tunnel that is protected but not the same kind of protection to get him inside. again, ridiculously long answer. [laughter] >> this is all fascinating i can see everyone is on the edge of their seat. [applause] i'm going to ask one more question before we turn it over to thehe audience so start

thinking now about your questions. president bush of course leaves office and is replaced by president obama and as you said, there wasn't the same level of funding provided to the services and other agencies post 9/11 into the same time president obama as the first black president faced threats. how did that to stretch the agency even further? >> i'm so glad you asked because in a way it's a bit of a perfect storm. after 9/11, all sorts of agencies are stood up from scratch. transportation security all of a sudden tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands

of recruits and employees and addedto this huge department of homeland security and what congress into the president or the most worried about is the last thing that just happened and it's how do we stop planes from being used as weapons of mass destruction. how do we make the skies safe again. it's the only thing they are worried about and secondarily how do we prevent terrorists from getting into the country hence customs and border patrol. incredible operation that is amped up to secure the ports, secure the borders. some people would argue terrorists are not coming in through tijuana but we spent to secure those borders again in the wake of 9/11 there was a primary. secret service is not on the president's radar at this time

and, i mean, president bush before obama takes over. it's true for president obama as well with this is a weakening of the agency. why all the money is going to the big sister agencies that are supposed to keep us safe. the only problem is they are forgetting the president's target number one for isis and mass shooters who want to be famous. so the secret service has comparatively shrunk littler and littler trying to keep up. its mission is expanding. largerer number of people to protect. it's eating away at its ability to do the job. the perfect storm the other threat of that and incoming front is that president obama represents an existential threat to a portion of america's who believe a black president is a danger to them and disgusting to

them and threats against president obama quadruple compared to the previous president. now i have to put some context tthere. internet threats, the use of the internet is on the rise, so it's possible that the increase is increasespartially attributablet but i've read some of the chatter that is collected and investigated and it is spine tingly terrified how we can hang michelle obama and how this could be done. ways in which president obama could be drawn. there is a visceral threat material. it's not a guy in a bar mouthing off about a black president although that happened also. it is a very worrisome time for the obama's.

the director at s the time who's been criticized pretty badly for not being more forceful just like the director is begging for additional money but when he doesn't get it, he kind of stops begging and the service is depleted. >> thank you so much for telling us more about that and now we would like to let the audience ask a few questions. we have some microphones up here and we look forward to hearing from you. >> at the end of a rifle is often referred to as the muzzle. [laughter] >> really. you just touched on obama and some of the things that happened to him. as the secret service concerned

about a transportation secretary and do they have a responsibility there? >> there's one other guy that i was worried about, but you'll know. >> i i'm not sure with the thret matrix is but i would imagine that because of his prominence ander also his very public position, i would imagine that it's higher than normal for a cabinet secretary, but i don't know enough to speak intelligently about this threat matrix and what that would trigger for him. many cabinet secretaries have protection provided to them by their own agency for example the epa administrator had his own secretsore or provided within s agency and her agency at times. that's true as well for the state department.

hillary clinton was protected by the diplomatic security core. it happened as she was also the first lady and was given lifetime protection and had to secret service protection at. night so don't know the answer on pete. i will tell you it's interesting the people you don't expect to have a threat matrix while i was here yesterday i reported a story about the deputy national security advisor. investigating what appears to be a strangend man who came onto hs lawn and may have tried to break into his home days in our hours after this national security advisor became the public face for sanctions against russia in the white house briefing room. if you remember david axelrod he

got a detail after a man began shooting in the lobby of the holocaust museum. the man died, he was killed, the shooter was killed but when they went through his pockets they found all these drawings and the address and phone number for david axelrod and commentary about his jewishness so secret service began protecting him after that. >> can you talks about today what's happening with the secret service relative to biden and i know you are well versed in the last years with trump and perhaps some context on where we aree now. >> i hope someone here's what i'm about to say beyond this room. i'm very disappointed that after

basically diagramming what's wrong and broken with the secret service and how underserved the agents are by the federal government and white house and providing them t with funding tt the biden administration has done almost nothing to rectify that. the biden administration has a lot of problems on its plate and i acknowledge that but one of the agents that came to me and risked their careers to say a president is going to get killed it's a matter of time. i'm channeling their very passionate fear and nothing that is other than the margin has been fixed. >> is there anything in congress to do anything about it?se

>> nothing. >> when did the secret service protection start with the presidency and next question related to that when the former president flees to saudi arabia because he doesn't want to face the various lawsuits he has what measures if any can be done to remove his secret service or does he have it for life? [applause] >> i think i understood. they began a little after 1901 in mckinley's assassination. we just can't keep letting presidents died because a comes up to them with a gun.

as for the former president, it's hard to lose your lifetime promise of protection. it's written into the statute and a president can try to declines it but the u.s. government doesn't have the option to decline protecting former presidents and first ladies. it is a guarantee. if you were in prison there would be another provision for how that happens. [applause] [laughter] i'm not predicting i just know that question has come up before. >> it is really a riveting book. you spoke about the patriotism and the sense of duty to their country then you talk about how many votednd for trump. bi'm wondering if you can talk about how anyny democratic

president can feel safe with that sort of mentality. >> i'm glad you asked the question becauseal the kicker fr my book is essentially me learning in the wake of january 6th because i was reporting i had to come out of the book leave because of january 6th and keep reporting for the post, which i'm glad for that duty and that mission i learned secret service agents were rooting in some instances for the interactionist's who attacked fellow police officers. how can you be blue and vote for someone to take a poll into the chest of another. that really frightened me about our society and that mission.

but the secret service like all law enforcement agencies liens conservative. that's okay. the fbi liens conservative. i'm sure the tucson police department liens conservative. the secret service, all these agencies had a duty to check your politics at the door, to leave it outside and put it in the locker and i think it's illustrative of the rest of the country as the country has become more and more divided, as did the fbi and other law enforcement agencies become more open about their political viewpoints and increasingly uncomfortable checking their politics at the door.

i want democratic liberal leaning politics checked out the door. it's about the mission, but that changed and again i give him credit for his genius he convinced many americans had secret service agents that he was their defender, their protector. >> thank you for being here. i have a question i read in the paper today we are spending millions protecting michael pompeo.hy where does that money come from and why is he so important? why aren't people that are in charge now being protected instead? >> i will try to be quick because i saw a two minute

warning over there. rather infamously, donald trump extended protection for his adult children for six months after he left office and for three top aides the national security advisor, his chief of staff and i'm blinking on the third. i wrote theis story but i can't remember what i wrote. pompeo is not in the group but he is getting protection now from the state department and i have to believe the biden state department again not political just happens to be the next president has found a justifiable reason to protect him the threats against him rise to that level that he needs the security. you asked where does the money come from, the state department's budget and ultimately out of our pocketbooks and i can't help but

think it also diminishes our ability to provide a kind of protection the secret service wants to provide. one last question. >> i had quite the urge to deliver some commentary on this event because i try to remain invested in a lot of these type of things. i want to maintain a strong interest to the audience and to theny speaker so here's my question right off the bat. what are some of the key duties for the protective services? >> i hope i understand the question right. you mean monitoring social media? the social media has a huge

responsibility and duty because it's where people make threats. social media is where the proud boys at times communicated their plans so you can get some good clues from monitoring this about what bad guys are up to and what they are threatening. it's an importantou question. thank you. >> and do you think the proud boys are the most noteworthy example of the insurrectionist groups? was there a group you found the most noteworthy that could have started from before the insurrectionist self?re >> there are three main groups although i am not a prosecutor or fbi agent. they have tons of evidence i haven't seen. bookkeepers, proud boys. >> thank you. >> great to know.

loved the speech. [applause]