Who Is Dale Pupillo?

Here's another case of professional reporters, even on the right-wing Hunter Biden beat, who don't seem to have the initiative to do minimal followup when stories break. Earlier this week, I've been relying on a New York Post story from June 2021 covering the efforts of two former Secret Service agents to roust Hunter from his Hollywood hotel room and straighten out his charges for Russian escorts in May of 2018. The reporter, Miranda Devine, lists their names and some details of their Secret Service careers, but it looks like her Google skills, at least at the time, were perfunctory.

She notes that one of the former agents, Dale Pupillo, was "a retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, who used to guard his father." That's a little like calling Osama bin Laden a distant member of the Saudi royal family who used to be in the construction business. Dale Pupillo, it turns out, was probably the key member of Secret Service management who was fired in the wake of the "wheels up, rings off" scandal, whereby in April 2012, 11 Secret Service agents on a presidential advance party were suspended following an incident with prostitutes at a hotel in Colombia.

The most visible risk was that one or more prostitutes had been brought into the secure environment that had been set up in advance of President Obama's visit, but the agents were intoxicated as well. This led to the resignation of the Secret Service director and a fuller investigation of the agency's culture, which led to further discipline of its upper management. In January 2015,

“Acting Director Joseph P. Clancy on Tuesday informed the four assistant directors who oversee the Secret Service’s core missions of protection, investigations, technology and public affairs that they must leave their leadership positions,” the Washington Post reports. “The departures would gut much of the Secret Service’s upper management, which has been criticized by lawmakers and administration officials in recent months for fostering a culture of distrust between agency leaders and its rank-and-file, and for making poor decisions that helped erode quality.”

. . . Sex scandals, including agents paying for prostitutes on a trip to Colombia, were embarrassing and raised questions about how the agency was being run, but the utter failing of the protective detail to stop an armed intruder from entering the White House appeared to be the final straw. A Department of Homeland Security review of the Secret Service in November detailed a comedy of errors revealing an agency in desperate need of reform.

The Associated Press reports the officials being forced out are: “Dale Pupillo, who led protective operations. . .

An interesting footnote is that President Obama was on board with the move:

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the decision was made by acting Secret Service Director Joe Clancy without consulting the West Wing but that Obama was “certainly very supportive of” the efforts to reform the agency.

. . . “The White House was certainly well-aware of the efforts that the director was undertaking to implement some management leadership reforms at the agency,” Earnest said. “The reforms that he announced are consistent with the findings of the independent blue-ribbon panel that took a look at the [Department of Homeland Security] review of the Secret Service.”

So at the beginning of 2015, after an incident where a nut with a knife was able to jump a fence and open a White House door, which presumably got Obama's attention, a blue-ribbon panel decided it was on Dale Pupillo's watch, and he was fired from his job as head of the Secret Service protection operation.

Next thing we hear, he's in the lobby of The Jeremy in Hollywood three years later trying to entice Hunter Biden to come down and talk about his escort charges. Back in Washington, he was a big-picture kind of guy, responsible for the whole Secret Sevice protection function. By 2018, he was Philip Marlowe tracking down drug addicts in Hollywood hotel lobbies. Where is Raymond Chandler when we need him?

But this isn't over. What of the other Secret Service agent in this story, Robert Savage III? The Miranda Devine story covering the episode at The Jeremy says,

What we do know from the laptop is that a few hours after Hunter’s debit-card woes began, text messages start arriving that are labeled as being from Robert Savage III. Savage was once the Secret Service’s special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office and a contact card for him appears on the laptop, with a photographic avatar, phone number and Secret Service email address.

The Secret Service told The Post that Savage retired from the agency on April 30, 2018 — weeks before the Biden debauchery — and that the agency “did not provide protection to any member of the Biden family in 2018.”

Savage’s lawyer says, “My client has never met or communicated with Hunter Biden.”

Here's another former high-level guy at the Secret Service who's come down to the Philip Marlowe level doing detail-level work with Hollywood druggies and hookers. And let's face it, the Secret Service is doing what it can to distance itself from the guy. But let's do a little more googling. Right after his retirement on April 30, 1968, just a few weeks before the Jeremy assignment,

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Strategic private security firm 360 Group International, Inc. today announced that Lorenzo Robert Savage III, a retired senior executive with the U.S. Secret Service, has been named CEO of the company effective immediately. Bill Kirkpatrick, founder of 360 Group and former CEO, will remain President of the firm.

Kirkpatrick said bringing Savage to the company “represents a key strategic development in advancing and expanding the mission of 360 Group International. The company’s ongoing growth and strength of reputation is the result of acquiring some of the most senior-level and experienced security experts in the world combined with best-in-class service to our customers.”

Under Mr. Savage’s leadership, 360 Group International is expanding or enhancing its capabilities in many security areas, including cybersecurity assessment and threat analysis. In his prior role, Mr. Savage oversaw the multi-jurisdictional Los Angeles Electronic Crimes Task Force.

Wait a moment. Something's not right. Here's another big-picture guy, hired by 360 Group as CEO, and after a few weeks on the job, he's trying not very successfully to roust crackhead Hunter out of his room at The Jeremy? The 360 Group says of itself on its website:

We pride ourselves on building long lasting client relationships and providing effective solutions for a wide variety of security challenges. We strive to guarantee a superior level of professionalism, discretion and confidentiality.

Our reliable resources and professional associates enable us to provide clients with global security support ensuring that any capability is within reach.

Whatever level of professionalism, discretion, and confidentiality the new CEO of 360 Group was providing, it doesn't seem to have worked very well for his client, which in one way or another was Joe Biden. Nor was his ineffectiveness at handling Hunter at the Hollywood gumshoe level reassurance that "any capability is within reach".

Here's my theory. It's hard not to think Savage was being eased out of the Secret Service. At some point, he'd developed contacts with Joe Biden when Biden was vice president, possibly even knew the rest of the family, including Hunter. The e-mails referenced in the Miranda Devine story suggest there was some sort of private relationship. So he used his contacts, quite possibly knowing the Biden operation-in-exile needed Secret Service-style security work that even the Secret Service under the new regime might not want to undertake itself, and sold them a package.

He then took the package to 360 Group, which was and apparently is a reputable executive protection and private security firm, and told them he can bring them the Joe Biden account -- all they need to do is make him CEO. It sounds like he sold it as a really big deal, long-term money tree kind of arrangement. He's got an inside track with Joe and the whole family. Maybe when Biden's elected, he'll outsource the Secret Service or something, and 360 Group will get the deal.

Instead, he's on the Hunter detail with Dale Pupillo. My guess is that this wasn't what 360 Group had in mind. Anyhow, when I went to the 360 Group site, Robert Savage III no longer appears on the list of executives. Instead, Bill Kirkpatrick, who was "former CEO" in the press release from 2018, is CEO again. It sounds to me as though Robert Savage III didn't work out as expected at 360 Group.

Did Savage hire Dale Pupillo for the Hunter job? Or did Pupillo set up some bigger deal that involved sending Savage to 360 Group? My takeaway is that both Pupillo and Savage were comically incompetent -- they'd in fact turn up in a Raymond Chandler novel, but they'd be bumped off by someone like Weepy Moyer in short order, and Marlowe would dismiss them not quite sadly in a characteristically worldly and pithy remark.

Makes me think I should try another Hollywood noir novel. But this also says a lot about Bidenworld. You don't get figs from thistles.