Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  When Director Randolph Alles went to the media for an exclusive interview to drum up political capital for a “legislative solution” for Congress to remove the pay cap on overworked agents, the media ran with headlines such as “Secret Service Depletes Funds to Pay Agents Because of Trump’s Frequent Travel, Large Family.”

  Add to that the Russia “scandal,” an overly complex allegation of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, not to swing the election but to discuss possibly obtaining information from Russian sources about Hillary Clinton’s criminal wrongdoing. There are mountains of echo chamber commentary but only three sources. The oldest son of then-candidate Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., had a “bombshell” exchange of emails with a person he believed was a Russian attorney who offered physical proof of Clinton’s criminal wrongdoing—but he released those emails himself and admitted to trying to set up a meeting, which never actually happened. There was also a meeting between Trump Jr. and two scam artists that ended after thirty minutes when the son realized it was a hoax. Also contributing “evidence” are Fusion GPS and a British journalist, Louise Mensch. Both cite anonymous sources without any real evidence and basically ask the American people to trust them. Fusion GPS is pleading the Fifth Amendment before Congress’s investigation into questions of its political donors and ties. Mensch, who works for News Corporation, is also citing anonymous sources and nothing more. Even with FISA warrants executed and one campaign staffer being raided by the FBI, there is still zero physical evidence to be had other than what Donald Trump, Jr., served up.

  Many of the same organizations and media power players that have woven the Russiagate web together based on zero clear evidence are the same ones that would weave a similar web asking the public to sweep scandals regarding Trump’s political opponents under the rug. The media organizations that are all too happy to dig into the Trump-Russia connections are altogether uninterested in exposing the collapse of the Secret Service even as their work pushes more mentally ill and unstable people to target the president.

  Hyperbole runs rampant. The media echo chamber and some cable news networks cycle a constant fixation on the topic. Some reckless government officials and news sources have accused the president of being a traitor or colluder, rigging the election, sabotage, dooming the planet to Armageddon, even genocide. Every president since Truman has probably been accused by some of “being” Adolf Hitler, but the trend is growing, serving as the most widely used soft endorsement. The Hitler comparison is a soft endorsement, yet still a call to murder. The situation has gotten so bad that a North Carolina councilwoman compared the first year living under President Trump to living under Hitler and one Puerto Rican mayor accused the president of perpetrating something she considers “close to genocide.”

  Such hyperbole being aimed at the individual—Donald Trump or any other—and not the office or larger political ideology creates a paradigm in which many feel that the problem is that individual and that the solution is the elimination of that specific person. Similar hyperbole directed at policies, though inappropriate, doesn’t directly levy the blame on human beings, let alone a very specific human being.

  In the age of social media, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and leagues of other websites abound where anyone can make threats against the president. The Secret Service used to investigate all threats against the president, but it has changed its focus to going only after “serious” threats. “Serious” is characterized by a person having the means, motive, opportunity, and intent to make an attempt. If an elderly disabled person confined to a wheelchair, who does not own any firearms, has no zero military or relevant experience, has few funds, and has zero access to bombs or vehicles were to make threats, that person would not be considered a serious threat. But if a threat is made by a wealthy, able-bodied, military-aged male with some military experience, access to guns and explosives, access to a car, and a criminal history, that man would be considered a very serious threat. The Secret Service is inundated with threats and it has to pick and choose which threats to investigate.

  President Trump is the most targeted and most at-risk president because of an increased trend that has put presidents at ever-greater risk because of the Secret Service’s screwed-up priorities—a list topped by protecting its own “brand.”

  So what is being done?

  In October 2014, the DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, ordered the creation of a United States Secret Service Protective Mission Panel, or USSSPMP, to investigate the Secret Service’s White House defense, recommend candidates for the next director and “subjects for further review,” and would “provide a roadmap for reform that a new director and newly invigorated Secret Service will need to implement.” Though the media had long been distracted by other, juicier stories, the results of the USSSPMP were released two months later, and they were dire.

  The report seemed to contradict itself. Sandwiched between high praise and flattery were acknowledgments that the Secret Service had refused to implement needed changes, but it offered no explanation and said that the service was in great disrepair. It told of how the White House fence was extremely scalable, yet the service had never tackled the issue going back to World War II. It said that the service was “starved for leadership,” not resources. It made abundantly clear that the service’s only hope would be to bring in a director from the outside. It revealed that the “average special agent received only forty-two hours of training” and that “the Uniformed Division as a whole received 576 hours of training, or about 25 minutes for each of over 1,300 Uniformed Division officers.” The situation was so desperate that the report recommended that the future director should “shed” nonessential missions.

  Then came the blockbuster revelation: “the Panel has been hamstrung to some extent by the lack of complete data. Put simply, the Service does not have systems in place to make the most prudent budgeting choices.” It continued diplomatically, “the Service has, for years, looked at its base budget and tried to ballpark how much more it might be able to get through the OMB [Office of Budget and Management] and congressional processes. The result, however, is that no one has really calculated how much the mission, done right, actually costs. That is why one of our most important recommendations is that a new director start with a zero-based budget. Forget about what the Service has asked for in the past.” And the Secret Service still didn’t even have an accountant!

  It recommended, as an interim first step for the sake of the president and the White House, that the service hire 85 more PPD agents and 200 Uniformed Division officers to protect the White House. But the report didn’t end optimistically. It said, “Many of the recommendations set forth below are not new. Indeed, some of them precisely echo recommendations that the White House Security Review made in 1995… but that remain concerns today. Others even harken back to recommendations by the Warren Commission Report following the assassination of President Kennedy.” It acknowledged without explanation the fact that Secret Service leaders had recognized glaring problems but had never implemented solutions. The USSSPMP staff kept referencing their inability to understand how the service had fallen so far and why its directors were asleep at the wheel. The answer that eluded them was the Master Plan; the downfall had occurred in large part due to the service’s made men.

  In December 2015, the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released its report United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis. The document was 437 pages long with numerous footnotes, which was probably why no one in the media decided to bother with its findings or recommendations. The congressional hearings and interviews with representatives had yielded an occasional juicy article, interview, or video snippet, especially as representatives grilled directors and Secret Service supervisors and dressed them down on C-SPAN. Once the report was issued to the media, the Secret Service and Congress seemed to consider the service’s problems settled, put to bed. The members of the oversight committee felt they had done their job.


  Some of the highlights of the report were:

  • After one of the two female assassins who had targeted President Ford, Sara Jane Moore, was released from prison in 2007, the agent assigned to her to make sure she was no longer a threat became close friends with her. She was invited to his son’s wrestling matches, to a Labor Day event at his home, and even to his wedding to another agent, where many Secret Service agents were in attendance. Several agents involved were punished, excluding the supervisor who had permitted it.

  • The service had fewer total personnel in 2015 than when the Protective Mission Panel had recommended a hiring increase in December 2014.

  • In 2012, the same year in which numerous scandals occurred, the service officially listed protection as “Goal 2” and financial investigations as “Goal 1.”

  • The service has a big problem with incidents of physical abuse and sexual misconduct by agents, such as supervisors assaulting subordinates and agents having sex with informants and suspects in exchange for reduced sentences—and not punishing the agents for it.

  • Even though a Special Services Division agent pointed a gun at his wife during a domestic dispute, had a long list of abuses toward his wife, failed a polygraph, had extramarital affairs with eight women and was a “swinger,” the service failed to levy any charges against him and allowed him to retire.

  • Though driving under the influence is a serious crime for civilians, the Secret Service holds itself to a far lesser standard and even routinely saves employees arrested for it from being charged by local police.

  • The service publicly announced that Deputy Director A. T. Smith had accepted a position with another agency but kept him on the payroll so he could continue to be paid.

  Though the oversight and investigation were theatrical and the report’s findings glaring and incredible, the recommendations put forward by Congress were a joke, even lazy:

  • The committee found rampant abuses of misconduct at the middle management level were followed up by the excuse that “USSS supervisors lacked clarity about when to report possible misconduct to the Office of Professional Responsibility.” Its recommendation was that “Supervisors should receive formal training on the new guidelines for promptly referring allegations of possible misconduct to the Office of Professional Responsibility.”

  • When the committee found that low morale and the exodus to other agencies had harmed the service, it recommended that “USSS should report to Congress on additional proposals to decrease attrition and improve morale.”

  • The committee found that the DHS’s Office of Inspector General panel was staffed almost exclusively by former Secret Service agents, despite prior recommendations to diversify the panel. It recommended that “USSS should be more proactive in pushing DHS to appoint non-USSS employees to the Board.”

  • The committee found that the Secret Service had a corrupt habit of keeping made men on the payroll while investigations into their misconduct went on indefinitely, until the agent could retire with full benefits. It recommended that after an investigation, “USSS should review its disciplinary processes to find ways to streamline and make them more efficient and effective.”

  • The committee found that the service had a continued hiring crisis. It recommended that “Congress should ensure that USSS has sufficient funds to restore staffing to required levels, and USSS should ensure that it has systems in place to achieve these goals.”

  • The committee found that the service’s Security Clearance Division was understaffed and recklessly cutting corners to hire unqualified or unfit recruits. It recommended that “USSS should take care to minimize risks to national security throughout the hiring process.”

  Really? Talk about catching the fox in the hen house and then putting him in charge! The findings go on, becoming increasingly more bizarre, exposing unprofessional and irresponsible conduct. The recommendations amount to nothing more than “USSS should stop doing the wrong thing and try to do the right thing.” It was an shame that a report so well founded was so feckless. The committee essentially found an agency that was willfully “collapsing” due to incompetency, misconduct, arrogance, and self-interest and kept the abusers in charge to turn the agency around. Legislatively, the only thing Congress forced the Secret Service to do about all its wrongdoing at the expense of the president’s security was take more money.

  This is the agency that is in charge of protecting President Trump. We’re in trouble.

  After his inauguration, President Trump made an incredibly bold move that had been unprecedented for nearly seventy years. Taking the recommendations from the 2014 Protective Mission Panel and 2015 House Oversight Committee report, he appointed a new director who had never served with the service. He went against the grain of the made men, and things seemed hopeful when he appointed Randolph Alles as Secret Service director. Alles took charge on April 25, 2017.

  Alles wasn’t quite the outsider many had hoped for. He had been acting deputy commissioner and chief operating officer of US Customs and Border Protection, but he had improved that agency’s morale. Before that he had served thirty-five years in the Marine Corps and retired as a major general in 2011 after he and his units had earned numerous commendations and medals.

  Early in his directorship, Alles made the rounds at the White House, speaking to Secret Service employees everywhere—a very welcome sign. But officers and agents revealed that they had been hopeful before. All the made men now under the new director are the same who carried the torch that burned the agency down. Only time will tell whether Alles will join the ranks of the service’s made men and adopt the deeply flawed and dangerous Master Plan as his own or whether he’ll take a chain saw to the organization’s bloated bureaucracy and cut the anchors that hold presidential protection back.

  He showed signs of falling into the pattern of the made men, his current inner circle, when he told the media that he blamed the president and Congress—anyone but the Secret Service itself—for the agency’s problems. He told USA Today that “the president has a large family” and that the solution is for Congress to get rid of the pay caps on agents’ salaries. But the problem was never the pay caps; the problem was having too few agents and the decades of the service’s leaders prioritizing taking on new missions over preparing for future presidencies.

  Understaffed agents have to work twice as hard. The solution is more difficult than obtaining more funds. It requires fixing all the long-standing ills pointed out by Congress, the DHS, and even former outspoken agents and officers. Seeing how Director Alles might turn toward the dark side by endorsing the pursuit of quick-fix solutions, many in the service believed he would be just another typical director.

  Perhaps the best hope, just maybe, lies in the new, highly unorthodox president, the unafraid establishment bucker. If the mainstream media, a candidate as formidable as Hillary Clinton, and even insiders within his own party weren’t a match for him, perhaps the Secret Service’s made men won’t be either.

  One incident seemed to have especially pissed off President Trump. In March 2016, two Secret Service agents assigned to the youngest first grandson, who is only eight years old, abandoned their posts to take a selfie with the protectee while he was sleeping. The first grandson awoke and was startled to see the agents hovering over him. The Secret Service responded by investigating the agents, not for criminal wrongdoing but for possibly abandoning their posts.

  President Trump made an announcement in October 2017 that he plans to allow the unsealing of the remaining files pertaining to President Kennedy’s assassination, including the files of the CIA, which has continuously fought their release and had succeeded in persuading each previous president to keep them sealed.

  It seems now that the “secret” will be let out of the bag. Maybe there’s nothing in the old documents, but doing away with the secrets that have lent credence to conspiracies, doubts, and questions is an incredible gesture. As Secret Service reports have demonstrate
d, the service had even neglected to implement solutions recommended by the Warren Commission, and as a result, presidential protection has been jeopardized ever since. Perhaps it is foolish to be hopeful, but one thing is certain: the more transparent the story of the Kennedy assassination becomes, along with the details of the Secret Service’s involvement, the better.

  Whether they are mistakes of the past, such as losing President Kennedy, or mistakes of the present, such as not preparing properly to cover the Trump family, the Secret Service’s problems need to be shared with the public. Like every other taxpayer-funded agency, it must be transparent to the American public. While some in Secret Service management might fear this, in truth it will only make the agency stronger. We can hope that President Trump and the Secret Service finally make the changes necessary to ensure a presidential protection that is “worthy of trust and confidence”—one that has strong morals and faith in its mission and whose agents and officers are well rested, well trained, and alert. We need the service to be as strong as it can possibly be—not just for the sake of current and future presidents but for our nation.

  NINE.

  MAKING THE SECRET SERVICE GREAT AGAIN

  “Snowflakes.”

  The word evokes either snickers or defensive rebukes. It’s an insult usually used to call out juvenile complainers who perceive slights and prejudices in the smallest of social interactions, often where there is none. Snowflakes believe their self-worth is contingent on how entitled they feel, rather than the services and value they create that they can exchange with other producers. Snowflakes are people who can’t reconcile themselves to the real world, where risk and hard work equal reward.