Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  That made Clinton’s “soft-skinned” unarmored van a death trap ready to be sprung by an approacher with so little as a small-caliber handgun, and it was a clear indication that the candidate, for whatever reason, had insisted on it. Agents had to ask themselves: Would the Secret Service’s protective plan still work without its core piece of equipment? They hoped and prayed, because that’s all that would make the difference should someone target that ridiculous van. In actuality, Clinton’s insistence on the van was no different from President Kennedy’s insistence on riding in a convertible and in some ways even more dangerous. That is exactly the kind of thing that drives protectors’ morale down and should not be tolerated by the public or Congress.

  In true Clinton fashion, even as a candidate—in an election she was expected to win handily—she involved the Secret Service in yet another series of scandals. The 2016 Clinton email scandal created a firestorm. Just like the allegations of her and her husband’s bribes and perjuries and allegations of his sexual misconduct going so far as to involve the Secret Service in criminal investigations by the DOJ and FBI, everyone wanted to know whether her “private” yet government-hosted email servers were physically and digitally under Secret Service protection. In addition, there was an intrusion into Clinton Foundation servers and theft of information on them. The subsequent investigation by the FBI revealed that a Secret Service agent on the former president’s detail had aided the Foundation’s private investigation.

  The twists and turns of the Secret Service’s involvement are many, but after Clinton lost the election, it seemed as though the political capital to investigate the service’s involvement in various campaign intrigues fizzled out. But there can be no doubt that the agency barely dodged being dragged into another series of Clinton scandals and investigations.

  Then there was candidate Trump. Much of how he treats his detail is unknown. Officers and agents interviewed for this book have reported good things, but it is still early in the administration and the protector-protectee relationship has yet to fully form. But Trump has been known to make nice gestures. For example, he assigned a private concierge exclusively to assist Secret Service personnel stationed at Trump Tower in New York City, but that service was turned down after it was deemed improper for the agency to accept it.

  There have been some difficulties, too. The Secret Service signed a lease with Trump Tower in 2015, but that ended during negotiations for a new lease when both sides wouldn’t budge over some unknown clause.

  The main problem, however, is not how the Secret Service interacts on a day-to-day basis with President Trump. The more systemic issue is that the collapsing Secret Service is setting President Trump—and future presidents—up for failure.

  President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017. Immediately, he found himself facing a trifecta of threats unlike any president before him: the collapse of the Secret Service, which is supposed to protect him; a national trend of “soft endorsement” of violence against the president; and political operatives using Secret Service mishaps in their efforts to assassinate the president’s political reputation.

  The chief concern among this trifecta is that President Trump remains under the care of a protection agency that has spiraled out of control. The 2015 House Oversight Committee Report spoke of an impending “collapse” in the agency’s future. The service’s leadership has succeeded in exhausting its officers with overtime and crushing their morale with poor working conditions, undignified treatment by management, and attempts to replace officers with agents as much as possible. Only the agents don’t want to go along.

  President Trump is surrounded by agents who are likewise overworked and exhausted, engulfed by a culture that values showboating, arrogance, and complacency over proper rest, training, readiness, morality, and family. All of those factors put him at risk of harm due to negligence or madness on the part of his protectors. Suicide, divorce, and psychological disorders are rampant, at rates unique to the service. It should be the exact opposite: the Secret Service should have the strictest standards of any agency. Our president needs to be protected by the best, brightest, and most ready—not the most tired, downtrodden, pissed off, disgruntled, and on the edge. More, the culture of corruption has allowed agents to blackmail the agency into further corruption while its made men drive whistle-blowers so far as to suicide, as we will soon see.

  In 2016, Agent Kerry O’Grady, the head of the Denver Field Office, left a long-winded post on Facebook, saying “I would take jail time over a bullet.” There can be no debate over whether she violated USSS and DHS agency policy and even the law, specifically the Hatch Act, which regulates public political endorsements by protectors, when she ended her comment with “Hatch Act be damned, I am with Her,” meaning Hillary Clinton.

  Agents informed the Secret Service leadership of the comments. Nothing happened. Then, on election day, she changed her profile picture to a Star Wars photograph with the words “A woman’s place is in the resistance.” Still nothing happened. Eventually her posts became public, and only then did the Secret Service respond—by making the situation worse.

  Civilians can tout “resistance” all they want. But a Secret Service agent, especially one who pledged her allegiance to the losing candidate and retracted her oath to defend the office, should be judged by the Secret Service’s standards of evaluating a potential threat. Using “means, motive, opportunity, and intent,” Agent O’Grady checks all boxes. She would be the ideal assassin, if only she weren’t brazen and unprofessional enough to make her thoughts public—but so many past presidential assassins (and would-be assassins) have done so in writing, posting, and calling in threats. Many agents and officers have resigned because they no longer value the mission, and that’s a good thing—they shouldn’t be there if they feel that way. But Kerry O’Grady’s continued paid vacation with no punishment demonstrates that the Secret Service culture remains a threat to President Trump. Her story is not unimportant; at her rank, she helped set Secret Service culture.

  Yet the service never fired her or even really punished her. It said she had been “removed,” but in fact she was placed on “administrative leave” pending an investigation that will last indefinitely, until she retires with a full pension. She’s been in the service for more than twenty-three years. The service is running out the clock for her for another year and a half, until she transfers to DHS or simply retires with maximum benefits. That’s the truth. It’s a well-known practice that the service runs out the clock on criminal investigations and then allows suspected wrongdoers simply to resign. That was done for Director A. T. Smith following pressure from Congress to fire him due to the security failings.

  Though many in the media have mistakenly confused the action taken against O’Grady for her actually being fired, she was really put on a Secret Service–approved taxpayer-funded paid vacation. She’s on “administrative leave,” but that doesn’t stop her pay, because, according to Secret Service, the internal investigation is not finished. That investigation is narrowly focused on trying to figure out if she made the posts while she was at work. Her Facebook posts are time-stamped “Sunday, 11:06 PM.” Either the Secret Service is incompetent at doing investigations and shouldn’t be entrusted with them, or its protective efforts are corrupt and it shouldn’t be trusted with them.

  So the agency in charge of investigating the most serious financial crimes has gone months without concluding whether Agent O’Grady made her time-stamped posts at work or not?

  Morale has taken another hammer blow and the agencywide culture of corruption has been further cemented. The spouses and family members of the agents in her office and under her command circulated a petition to Director Clancy to oust her immediately, saying that she was “no longer worthy of trust and confidence.” After all, her “soft endorsement” of violence directed at Trump put her Secret Service brothers and sisters, possibly even those in the Denver office, in the line of fire.

  Compare that t
o the service’s treatment of the officer who brought in a cake that said in icing, “Congratulations on making 305 out of 305,” making light of the Secret Service being declared the worst place to work in the federal government for morale and confidence in mission performance, as rated by each agency’s employees. He was given several days of administrative leave without pay.

  In 2017, another internal scandal broke out at the Secret Service. It turned out that the agency was fast-tracking disability retirements for its own nefarious purposes. Despite begging Congress for $200 million to $300 million more annually, the service tried to defraud taxpayers by falsifying disability-related retirement for agents in exchange for dropping their complaints against it. It was hush money, yet no one was fired or disciplined. Agent Robert MacQueen, a twenty-four-year veteran of the agency, saw his life and the life of a colleague become hell after they reported complaints of investigative misconduct to a Secret Service internal investigator. The service retaliated, accusing the two agents of collecting more overtime pay than they had earned and misusing a government car. MacQueen’s security clearance was revoked, and he was put on indefinite unpaid leave. The other agent, who was subjected to psychological torture from higher-ups, including “wife baiting”—calling the agent’s wife’s cell phone and asking her about the allegations of fraud—eventually committed suicide. DHS officials have noted that these tactics are seemingly reserved exclusively for whistle-blowers.

  In 2017, after my book Crisis of Character came out, the Secret Service called in White House officers, many of whom were my former colleagues, and repeatedly asked them to sign nondisclosure agreements that extended until after retirement. They were the same type of NDAs that Congress had ruled in 2015 violated whistle-blower laws—not to mention creating serious First Amendment rights issues. That was another form of the service’s soft intimidation.

  So there can be no doubt that the Secret Service is more concerned with crushing whistle-blowers than with reining in a culture that promotes self-preservation over missions, especially that of protecting President Trump and his family.

  All of the ills that led to all those scandals are still there and getting worse. Adding insult to injury, the service’s leaders give the public and Congress ridiculous excuses and promise solutions such as reminding agents that prostitution is bad and against policy and that from now on drinking before a president’s arrival in a foreign country will be allowed only in “moderate” amounts. Seriously? This is the same culture that preceded President Kennedy’s assassination.

  The Secret Service is needed now more than ever as “soft endorsements” of violence against the president become more mainstream. Though every election and advance in technology brings an uptick in threats made against each president, President Trump faces the soft endorsement of assassination by numerous celebrities, supposed role models, and even government officials.

  Celebrities have sought fame with gross “artistic” representations of violence against the president and have made statements in speeches before hundreds of thousands of people and posts to their even larger online audiences that endorse and normalize the idea of punching, killing, or beheading President Trump or even blowing up the White House. Though inappropriate depictions of violence occurred in the past, they were acts by individuals with zero or small followings. When one fringe political commentator threatened President Obama with “I’ll be dead or in jail,” that was an individual making his own threat against the president public. That celebrity was investigated by the Secret Service and warned, and many inside the service argue over whether it should have pressed charges. But soft endorsements are far worse.

  Hollywood celebrities have put large budgets and professional camera crews into depictions of shooting, beheading, and stabbing President Trump to death. For the beheading photo shown by comedian and former CNN host Kathy Griffin, though she was fired over the stunt, the photographer is still allegedly entertaining six-figure bids for original prints of the former CNN host holding up the effigy of the president’s decapitated head. Though such “artistic” statements are constitutionally not illegal, certain celebrities have made it clear to their large fan bases that they favor the idea of the president being attacked. This kind of soft endorsement is the means by which cowards give themselves legal deniability but simultaneously achieve their intended result: directing their fans to target the president.

  There are also many in the media who also make soft endorsements of violence, such as Rolling Stone’s depiction of one of the Boston Marathon murderers as a “rock star” on its cover. Whenever a tragic attack like that occurs, too many in the media shamefully pursue ratings by obsessively focusing on possible revelations and endless commentary to frightened Americans desperate to make sense of it. In doing so, they have made it clear that they are all too willing to make celebrities out of mass murderers and presidential assassins and thereby are complicit in exacerbating attacks and attempts.

  Current and former government officials should know better than to engage in soft endorsements, but obviously they don’t, hence Kerry O’Grady’s Facebook rant, which made a soft endorsement of agents failing in their protective duties for political motivations. Similarly, CNN’s counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd, formerly of the CIA and FBI, cavalierly told CNN host Jake Tapper on air that “As a former government official, the government is going to kill this guy,” meaning the president. He continued, “Government is going to kill this guy because [the president] doesn’t support them,” meaning the politics of people inside the government. Though Mudd later said he had meant “killing” figuratively, he then doubled down, referring to the “deep state” of government officials entrenched in agencies for twenty or thirty years, and said that this deep state is going to politically assassinate the president and his policies.

  Such statements result in society’s most vulnerable, the mentally ill, who are susceptible to these ideas, throwing themselves more willingly at officers on the White House fence line or at agents surrounding the president. Many celebrities put out public service announcements for antibullying, suicide prevention, and politically correct terminology, all grounded in the idea that words matter and, if abused, can cause great harm. So it’s incredibly ironic that many of the same celebrities are making statements that result in those who are mentally ill or emotionally disturbed throwing themselves at the Secret Service in attempts on the president’s life. There are millions of Americans and foreigners whose mental and emotional faculties hang on a thread. Any soft-endorsement of violence against the president can trigger an incident that pits them against the Secret Service. It happens all the time at the White House fence line, where officers typically take the offenders to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for treatment or, sadly, have to resort to using their firearms. Soft endorsements are incredibly reckless and get people killed. In October 2017, while the president visited the Capitol building, one man infiltrated the press pool and, from concealment, threw Russian flags at the president, shouting “Traitor!” The screaming man was not mentally ill, only pushed too far by the media. Though he had been screened by Capitol police, the incident created an extremely tense moment for the Secret Service, which had to identify: stunt or attack, flag, cell phone, camera, or nonmetal knife or gun that had been snuck through. In 2016 especially, several maddened approachers made attempts on the White House gates, giving officers little choice but to shoot them. Hyperbole and demagoguery seem to have been what pushed one man to make an attempt to assassinate several Republicans as they practiced for a bipartisan baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia, in June 2017.

  The newest tactic is using the Secret Service to politically assassinate the president, as if President Trump, having been in office only since January 2017, is responsible for all that is wrong with an almost two-hundred-year-old agency. Though preposterous, that could be the most dangerous threat of all.

  President Trump’s liberal opponents are already on the warpath. American Bridge 21st Ce
ntury is a political action committee (PAC) that describes itself on its web page as “a progressive research and communications organization committed to holding Republicans accountable for their words and actions.” It was founded by former Clinton operative David Brock in 2010 under the umbrella of Media Matters for America. In the Roll Call article “American Bridge 21st Century Super PAC Is Hub of Left,” Janie Lorber reported the PAC’s communications director as describing its role very simply: “Our existence means that [Democratic politicians and their committees] don’t have to put trackers out there and they don’t have to do research.” Lorber noted that “Much of the organization’s most effective work goes on behind the scenes, as it quietly feeds material to reporters all over the country” and that its millions of dollars in funding were provided by fewer than fifty donors, the biggest being George Soros. One former employee was quoted in the article as saying that between Brock’s Media Matters for America and American Bridge 21st Century, “They try to create their own echo chamber. It’s a fabulous strategy.”

  Now that echo chamber is directing its efforts at the Secret Service, submitting Freedom of Information Act requests, digging up dirt, and reporting on many of the Secret Service’s ills. But instead of directing them back at the Secret Service, they’re spinning them in an effort to blame President Trump. They’re spinning the service’s long-standing waste as if it were the fault of President Trump. They fault the president for having a large family that needs protection, for traveling to his residences, which demand protection, for leasing space to the Secret Service in New York City, and for no longer leasing space to the Secret Service in New York City. They blame the president for New York agents working out of a contractor trailer, for the Secret Service renting porta-potties, golf carts, and cars, and for the expense of Air Force One’s jet fuel. The practice of blaming the president for the service’s big expenses certainly grew under President Obama but is now rampant with claims that President Trump is “ruining” and bankrupting the Secret Service.