The Secret Service Needs an Intervention

O ne might think the Secret Service are top-line security experts who uphold the highest professional standards in their work.

They are not. We have known this for years. The questions that are arising about why the shooter at Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally wasn’t stopped before firing on the former president Saturday are sure to put more scrutiny on the agency in the coming days. And it will hardly be the first time.

In 2012, the federal government released a 229-page list of allegations against Secret Service agents going back to 2004. They included “involvement with prostitutes, leaking sensitive information, publishing pornography, sexual assault, illegal wiretaps, improper use of weapons and drunken behaviour,” the Guardian reported at the time. The list was heavily redacted, and it was not clear how many of the allegations were true.

That list came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request after the Secret Service prostitution scandal that we know was true, in which agents brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms during then-president Barack Obama’s trip to Colombia. They were also out late partying and drinking hours before needing to report to work protecting the president.

The Colombia scandal was a major news story at the time and attracted significant attention from Congress. It also attracted more attention from the press, which has reported on numerous other Secret Service failures and misconduct over the years, such as:

• In 2009, a couple that was not on the approved guest list gained entry to Obama’s first state dinner, where he was hosting the prime minister of India. Secret Service later confirmed that the couple’s credentials were never checked. The couple shook hands with Obama.
• In 2011, Secret Service agents were reassigned from patrolling the White House to protecting the home of a personal friend of the agency’s director.
• In 2011, a man fired at the White House with a rifle. The Secret Service mistook it for a backfiring car. They only discovered that the gunfire hit the building four days later, when one of the White House housekeepers told them about it.
• In 2012, a van the Secret Service had rented that contained metal detectors was stolen from a hotel parking lot the day before then-vice president Joe Biden was supposed to speak in Detroit on Labor Day.
• In 2012, a Secret Service agent left a firearm in the bathroom of Mitt Romney’s campaign plane. It was discovered by a journalist.
• In 2012, a Secret Service officer was found passed out on a sidewalk in Miami. He was not on duty at the time and was working in a support role for Obama’s visit to the city, which had concluded twelve hours earlier.
• In 2013, a supervisor in charge of two dozen agents in the president’s security detail was removed from his position after having tried to retrieve a bullet he left in a woman’s hotel room near the White House. The investigation into the supervisor found that he also separately had sent sexually inappropriate emails to a female subordinate.
• In 2014, three agents who were part of the team tasked with fighting off attackers of the president were placed on leave after heavy drinking during Obama’s trip to Amsterdam. One of the agents was found in a hallway, passed out drunk.
• In 2014, during a trip to Atlanta, a security contractor with a gun was in the same elevator as President Obama. The man took a video of Obama and did not stop when asked by the Secret Service, who did not realize until afterward that he had a gun.
• In 2014, a man with a knife jumped the fence at the White House, entered the building, and made it all the way into the East Room. He was stopped by an off-duty Secret Service agent. The alarm for the building was disabled because staff found it too noisy.
• In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security employee who led the internal review of the 2012 Colombia prostitution scandal was identified by a prostitute in Florida, who said he had paid her for sex. He refused to answer questions from the department’s inspector general about the incident and then resigned.
• In 2015, a Secret Service officer was fired after being arrested in a child-predator sting operation, where he sent naked photographs of himself to someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl. The online messages occurred while he was working at the White House.
• In 2015, two drunk off-duty agents drove into the secure area around the White House, colliding with a security barrier, while on-duty agents were dealing with a bomb threat. One of the drunk off-duty agents was second-in-command on Obama’s security detail.
• In 2015, two Secret Service officers were found to have been asleep on the job. They had regularly worked twelve-hour shifts, and one had worked 60 hours of overtime in the previous pay period in hot weather during the summer.
• In 2015, a supervisor was placed on leave after having been accused of sexually harassing an employee.
• In 2016, 41 Secret Service employees were disciplined after they leaked personal information about Representative Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of a congressional committee that was investigating Secret Service misconduct. An email from a top agency official said of Chaffetz “some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out.”
• In 2017, an off-duty Secret Service agent on the vice president’s detail was suspended after police caught him visiting a prostitute at a hotel in Maryland.
• In 2017, a man jumped three fences to gain access to the White House grounds and walked around for 16 minutes. He had looked through a window and rattled a door handle of the building.
• In 2017, a Secret Service employee’s laptop, lapel pins, and a bag were stolen from the employee’s car in Brooklyn. The laptop contained security plans for Trump Tower. The information was protected, and it contained no classified information.
• In 2017, Secret Service agents were accused of taking pictures with one of Donald Trump Jr.’s children while the child was asleep. Another agent reportedly dated Trump Jr.’s ex-wife.
• In 2019, a Chinese national carrying four cellphones and a malware-infected flash drive was allowed to enter Mar-a-Lago. He passed a Secret Service checkpoint and was not apprehended until reaching the club’s front desk.
• In 2022, four Secret Service members were duped by two men impersonating federal agents. Prosecutors said that “the scale of the compromise that they created is quite large.” Federal investigators had to use a moving truck to collect all the evidence from the two men’s apartments, which included firearms, ammunition, body armor, and surveillance equipment. They offered the Secret Service members gifts worth thousands of dollars and rent-free apartments.
• In 2022, two Secret Service employees were sent home during a trip by President Biden to South Korea. They had been drinking, and one of them got into an altercation with a taxi driver.

A 2014 panel of independent experts, commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, made 19 recommendations to improve the Secret Service. A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office found that six of the recommendations were still not fully implemented.

One of the recommendations was that agents on the presidential and vice-presidential protection details should spend 25 percent of their time in training. The Secret Service bargained that down to 12 percent, saying 25 percent was not feasible given staff levels. The GAO found that time actually spent in training never exceeded 7.5 percent between 2015 and 2020.

The 2014 panel recommended a new White House fence. The Secret Service did not begin construction on the fence until 2019. It was not scheduled to be completed until 2023.

The GAO also found that the agency was consistently understaffed. That included special agents, who protect the president and other individuals, and uniformed officers, who protect the White House grounds, the vice president’s residence, the Treasury, and diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C. The federal government spends $6 trillion a year and somehow can’t manage to hire enough people to protect the president and sensitive sites in the capital city.

Secret Service incompetence spreads to other areas as well. A 2016 Homeland Security inspector general’s report found that the agency “has not consistently made IT management a priority” and had outdated and unsecure IT practices. The inspector general found that of the 45 employees who accessed Chaffetz’s personal information, only four would have ever had a legitimate business need to access it. Lax IT security was previously addressed by the inspector general in 2011 and 2013.

A 2018 GAO report found that the Secret Service’s IT practices were still insufficient and that the problem was pointed out as early as 2008 in a National Security Agency audit. The agency had not implemented many workforce practices that would have improved IT security. A 2022 GAO report found that the Secret Service had fallen behind implementing new government-wide cybersecurity standards announced in 2021.

The Secret Service has a track record of failures and misconduct. It should not be viewed as it is sometimes portrayed in movies, as a crack squad of near-superhumans. It should be viewed for what it is: part of the federal bureaucracy, in need of serious questioning and accountability from taxpayers and their elected representatives.