When Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton last April hopped into a black van to drive from New York to Iowa, aides cheerfully dubbed it “Scooby Doo,” and said the candidate first thought of the name because it looked like the “Mystery Machine.”
“Aides have gone out of their way to note that the drive was Clinton’s idea. ‘She loves her Scooby van,’ tweeted Clinton communications director Jen Palmieri Sunday evening,” heralded Time Magazine.
Well, no. It turns out that the name originated with U.S. Secret Service agents assigned to protect Clinton during her 2000 Senate campaign in New York.
Former agent Dan Bongino, author of the newly released “The Fight, A Secret Service Agent’s Inside Account of Security Failings and the Political Machine,” told Secrets that agents mocked her first van with the cartoon name because it was “Scooby Doo brown” and ugly.
“We named it,” he said. “It enabled us to talk in code, we made that up, she didn’t” he said, adding, “They can’t even tell the truth about dopey things like who named the van.
His new book, released by St. Martin’s Press Monday, for the first time told of the Secret Service naming and he added details in an interview about the conversion van she chose instead of a limo to look less presidential.
“Remember the Mystery Machine, the van? That’s what it looked like. The fact that it was brown, it looked like the Mystery Machine that Shaggy used to drive. What made it even funnier was it was Scooby Doo brown. Now it’s black. It was a two-tone brown that was the ugliest thing ever,” Bongino told Secrets.
His second book delves deeply into the Secret Service workings and current politics. For example he raises new issues about White House security and told Secrets that while better fencing is needed, there is no will to spend the money.
Bongino also discusses the Hillary Clinton email affair and quotes a source saying that it was hacked and he even takes a shot at President Obama’s “insulated ideological life.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
