A Public Review of the Secret Service pt. 2

The seeming culture of entitlement and several failures of the United States Secret Service has been apparent for decades to many people. Repeated failures span from the attack on president John F. Kennedy to Congressional investigations regarding corruption within the same agency five decades later. Kennedy’s death is the most infamous dereliction that resulted in the firing of no one in particular. Neither the Secret Service’s leader or any person in the Kennedy detail was publicly held to serious account or fired. That precedent would extend for decades as the Service racked up hundreds of complaints, dozens of charges, and several performance failures. A noticeable minority of its members would neglect to adequately guard sitting presidents. By two thousand-thirteen US Secret Service had accumulated great notice for its spiraling mistakes. The administrations failed range both political parties and negligence would occur during several occasions.

Secret Service Director J. Pierson Resgined Due to Security Failures

Amidst two thousand-fourteen a suspect possessing a knife was able to scale the White House fence and enter the premises. He was stopped in the East Room and the normal alarm protocols that would have detected the intruder earlier were not active due to complaints of false triggering from political staff. A surveillance team further did not observe the intruder and this would reveal not just the alarms were the issue. Director Julia Pierson absorbed the political fallout with her resignation and unfortunately the Secret Service just shuffled leaders and did nothing to change its deep internal problems. Two high ranking agents of the Service “crashed a car” on White House grounds a year later. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general these agents were “likely drunk”.i This reaffirms brazen unprofessionalism supported by several past incidents whether it was drinking just hours before duty or on duty to such excess they were sent home from events in prior years.

During the spring of two thousand-seventeen an unknown figure scaled the White House fence carrying pepper spray and a note for then president Donald Trump. The most incredible part of this episode was the seventeen minutes an intruder was allowed to stay on the lawn despite having triggered numerous security sensors alerting the Secret Service. According to one report “Officials said afterward that Secret Services officer had ignored the alarm” and it required this sort of ineptness and deliberate failure which finally led to the firing of two agents. Yet most past agent misconduct was not truly punished but they were allowed retirement with benefits, placed on temporary leave, or just sent for retraining. It seems only after an undeniable catastrophic failure or committing brazen illegality will a Secret Service member be fired. Yet what if someone could not just avoid federal protection but also compromise the group trusted with defending America’s political leaders.

Haider ALI Lied to Officials and offered them illegal Gifts

The Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that amid two thousand and twenty-two members of the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security accepted several valuable gifts and housing from men impersonating federal agents for multiple years. The gifts from Haider Ali and Arian Taherzadah included free penthouse apartments, iPhones, surveillance systems, and electronic equipment. These men even offered a free rifle to a member of First Lady Jill Biden’s guard detail. Both were arrested and later sentenced to prison and the Secret Service fired a single agent despite that at least four members were compromised by this attempt to influence two different security agencies.ii iii Outside actors infiltrated security circles for years undetected and this reaffirms the failure of the federal officials to quickly prevent the compromise of national security organizations.

Arian Taherzadah Claims Official Gifts were a Friendly Gesture

We cannot rely much on the agents, leadership, or security organizations charged with securing our country should it require more than basic measures. That is a serious problem. If officials are truly concerned with improving agent performance they may wish to expand their scope to the entire organization’s leadership and protocols. Some might think it is a question of funding, but the Secret Service budget has nearly doubled in ten years to three billion dollars. Others may believe staffing is the issue, but the agency had added roughly twenty five percent more employees in the same period.iv The problem is not resources, personnel number, or official constraints and thus we are left to assess the security agency itself and those who lead it. We do not have another decade to squander on repeated failures and these issues require significant changes to correct. Changes that begin with restaffing, improved security training, protocol adaption, competitive pay, and well managed centralized operational command. The current Secret Service director may wish to inquire with the Department of Defense on how to run a more effective command structure.

In just over two months, two assassination attempts have targeted former president Donald Trump. Yet each was defined by vastly different environmental circumstances and the competence of security present. The first event was planned weeks prior in an open public area that provided officials plenty of time to learn and secure the location. Yet despite local officials providing ample warning of the security holes in the Secret Service plan, federal officials went ahead. The Secret Service had “repeatedly denied requests for more personnel and other security resources” for the Trump campaign prior to the Pennsylvania rally due to supposedly lacking resources. While none were denied at the Pennsylvania rally, the group’s own spokesperson affirms “In some instances...resources were not provided, the agency made modifications to ensure the security of the protectee”.v Thus federal security forces utterly failed even with the regular amount of personnel, resources, and “modifications” used for similar events.

Butler Township police had prior informed the Secret Service they needed to post agents on a building identified as a threat by the county tactical squad, a location the gunman would later use to fire shots. They did not. Interviewed officials at the planning meeting held with federal and local security agencies for the event would call it “informal and disorganized”.vi The communication structure used in the earlier summer attempt was “a cobbled combination of radio command centers and cellphones” which included two command centers instead of the usual one. The gunman was repeatedly observed with a rangefinder making several trips into the security perimeter and later assembled his weapon to establish a firing point. “When the local sniper spotted Crooks and texted his unit...other officers stationed inside the AGR building had to relay that information to the local command, who then told the State Police, who then told the Secret Service.” Instead of direct communication using a central command point with all these groups, a redundant game of telephone was played wasting precious time and resources when they were most needed. The current Acting Secret Service Director admitted that his agency had no idea regarding a “man on the roof, nothing about man with a gun. None of that information ever made it over our net.” Several of these obvious mistakes were captured on film, photo, and audio recordings which laid bare the stark errors of those entrusted with security arrangements.

The latest attempt that occurred at one of Trump’s golf courses includes far different circumstances. The latest suspect Ryan Wesley Routh was thirty years older than the last suspect Thomas Crooks. Routh has obvious political motivations and had called for Iran to assassinate Trump dissimilar to Crooks.vii A unique feature of this latest failed attack is he did not use a public event for the violent undertaking. Nearly every political assassination in American history has occurred at public events with crowds providing concealment to past criminals and distracting security. Instead Routh chose to set up a firing point in the dense shrubbery around the golf course and wait for his target to come within range. According to media reports he laid in wait for half a day with a rifle, scope, a camera to record his actions, two backpacks, and had an SUV nearby to flee. Advance patrol Secret Service agents spotted Routh’s gun barrel at least three hundred of yards away from Trump and shot at the position. The assailant fled after being spotted and was detained fleeing in his vehicle by authorities shortly after the failed attempt. If these agents had failed, as prior Secret Service groups recently had, Routh would obtained a clear shot roughly ninety yards away from the former president. Security had improved following the resignation of the last Secret Service director and placement of multiple employees on leave. Yet one success does not unmake decades of failures.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Resigned due to widespread Security Lapses

One local media source correctly notes of the Pennsylvania attack “weaknesses that led to the assassination attempt were not unique to the July rally but the inevitable breakdown of an already vulnerable system.”viii Decades of negligence were dismissed as mere isolated incidents but eventually the weight of too many debacles crushed these unrealistic official denials. This conforms to an over sixty year pattern of incompetent mismanagement that has affected important events and the course of history. While former director Kimberly Cheatle was assuredly incompetent, she was not alone, and inherited a system already in dire need of reform. The problems remain despite a single leader being replaced and one recent official admission of the need for a “paradigm shift”.ix These are not solutions, those shall require significant time and officials have already wasted several years denying these problems existed. If past performance is any measure of future behavior, officials shall continue resisting changes that would improve the Secret Service overall in the name of obscuring government incompetence.
Sincerely,
C.A.A. Savastano

References:
i. Aidan Pittman, July 18, 2024, Prostitutes, Grenades, and Drunk Driving: 20 years of Secret Service Scandals, U.S. News & World Report, usnews.com
ii. Holmes Lybrand and Evan Perez, FBI arrests 2 men in DC accused of impersonating federal officers; 4 Secret Service agents placed on leave, CNN, cnn.com
iii. Rebecca Carballo, December 3, 2023, Man Who Posed as Federal Agent Is Sentenced to Nearly 3 Years in Prison, New York Times, nytimes.com
iv. Simone Weichselbaum, Alexandra Chaidez, Andrew Blankstien and Julia Ainsley, July 20, 2024, ‘Agency in crisis’: Secret Service has decade-old staffing shortfall, NBC News, nbcnews.com
v. Julia Ainsley and Summer Concepcion, July 21, 2024, Secret Service denied requests for more security resources at Trump events before the attempted assassination, NBC News, nbc.news
vi. Irina Bucur, Tracy Leturgey, Jessica Lussenhop, Danielle Ohl, and Eddie Trizzino, August 20, 2024, Trump Assassination Attempt Laid Bare Long-standing Vulnerabilities in the Secret Service, ProPublica, propublica.com
vii. David Brennan, Chris Looft, and Julia Reinstien, September 16, 2024, Trump suspect told Iran ‘you are free to assassinate Trump’ in apparent self-published book, ABC News, abcnews.go.com
viii. Bucur, Leturgey, Lussenhop, Ohl, Trizzino, propublica.com
ix. Julia Ainsley, Jake Trayorm Elizabeth Chuck, and Rick Shapiro, September 16, 2024, Secret Service chief makes remarkable admission: We need a “paradigm shift’, NBC News, nbcnews.com

Updated October 2024

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