Brad Beeler

Bad people can hack that first impression, and we put horns and halos on people too quickly.

A lot of the scams I would work in the Secret Service were because people make great first impressions.

Yeah, I appreciate you, Mike, framing it that way because there's so many funny stories that I wish I could tell, but unfortunately I can't.

But I will say how I really got into communication was during the election of 2000.

I was on the advance for a George W. Bush event down in a site in Illinois.

And it was one of those things where it seemed like it was pretty low hanging fruit.

It was going to be a pretty easy event until the night before election.

We got a call to the Republican National Headquarters that basically said, I'm a sniper, I'm a good shot, obviously, and I'm going to take him out, meaning our protectee.

So it was one of those things where as a brand new agent, I didn't know what to do, kind of a snot-nosed kid.

And thankfully, I had an amazing agent named Bill that kind of took me under his wing.

and we tracked down where the phone call came from, small little strip mall, really nothing around there.

And what he did was magnificent as far as he whips out his pocket knife, cuts the, this is the old pay phone, so I'm really dating myself, but cuts the receiver off the phone, puts it in a Ziploc bag because he thought, oh, we made it for fingerprints, which kind of blew me away.

Then he kicked over the

the can, the trash can there and started digging through dirty diapers, all this stuff.

I had no idea what he was looking for.

And then just his experience really showed because he found a Styrofoam cup that had a little yellow piece of paper that actually had the phone number to the Republican headquarters.

So we knew that forensically, obviously, we would be able to prove based upon the Styrofoam handwriting potentially.

But

the visit was the next day so he took it the next step and we started going around looking at gas stations and various places to where where could this styrofoam cup could come from we went to the nearest store which was a shopping market and walked in talked to the manager and while we were talking to the manager in the break area his observation skills were amazing and what he was able to see across the room was a little yellow notepad that had a

piece ripped from it, where the piece that he found in the trash perfectly fit on it.