Dan Bongino is threatening to quit his talk show over the radio network's vaccine mandate

• Dan Bongino objected to a vaccine mandate from the owner of the network that airs his radio show.
• Cumulus Media requires employees to be inoculated against COVID-19 before returning to work.

The conservative pundit Dan Bongino on Monday threatened to quit his talk show to protest a vaccine mandate imposed by Cumulus Media, the owner of the radio network that his program airs on.

"You can have me, or you can have the mandate. But you can't have both of us," Bongino said during an episode of "The Dan Bongino Show."

Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and congressional candidate, is one of the most prominent and powerful right-wing commentators today. Earlier this year, he took over the conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh's radio slot in some markets. He featured former President Donald Trump on the first episode of his show.

"There is a very real thing called natural immunity. There's an even realer thing called freedom and liberty," Bongino said on Monday. "This is a constitutional republic. People have the right to make their own medical decisions, and the company has the right to do what it wants as well."

He added: "But if a company is going to make political decisions - and I believe this was a political decision, I don't believe this is based in any science - I could argue it all day. And they should at least recognize that the company is earning a lot of money off people who have the opposite political persuasion."

Cumulus Media announced on August 12 that its employees needed to be vaccinated before returning to work on October 11, Inside Radio reported.

"Put simply, we believe that Force Cumulus is at our best when we're working together in offices," CEO Mary Berner said in the statement, according to Inside Radio. "To do that as safely as we reasonably can, we're requiring that everyone be vaccinated except those legally excepted. It would neither be fair nor do we have the bandwidth to make exceptions based on individual preferences."

A few radio personalities at Cumulus-linked radio stations have left over the vaccine mandate, Inside Radio reported last week.

But The Bongino Report, a Twitter account linked to Bongino's news-aggregation website, said on Monday that Bongino was vaccinated.

"He is not resisting the vaccine mandate for himself but for other employees who don't have a platform to fight back as they risk unemployment if they don't comply," the tweet said.

Cumulus did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider regarding Bongino's status as a host on its network.