The Secret Service Had a Long History of Screw-Ups Before the Trump Assassination Attempt

On Tuesday morning, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her post. She’d been under intense scrutiny since the Secret Service badly botched things at the rally where former President Donald Trump was grazed by a bullet. For Vox’s Abdallah Fayyad, her resignation was somewhat inevitable.

“Obviously she’s not directing every single event, and not every failure is necessarily because of a lapse in her judgment. But how we’ve seen her respond is itself disqualifying to continue on as director of the Secret Service because she has been so reluctant to be transparent, even with lawmakers, about how to prevent this from happening again,” Fayyad said.

This lack of transparency? It was on full display earlier this week, when Cheatle showed up at a congressional hearing to answer lawmakers’ questions. By the time this hearing got going, the people in this room were pissed. They were wondering why the Secret service hadn’t spotted the shooter sooner. Then, they asked about new reports that Trump had been denied extra security when his team asked for it. These attacks on Cheatle were pretty bipartisan. And she seemed to either not have a lot of details about what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, or she just didn’t want to answer questions yet. “There’s this aversion to any kind of accountability when something goes sideways,” Fayyad said. And this aversion to accountability has been a problem for years before the rally in Pennsylvania. “The Secret Service does have a long history of not being exactly transparent with the people it needs to be transparent with, let alone the public.”

On Wednesday’s episode of What Next: Why the Secret Service’s long history means kicking out the person in charge is only the beginning. A portion of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, has been transcribed below.

Mary Harris: I started to hear about the Secret Service being a little messy during the Obama administration. In 2011, there was this incident where a gunman fired multiple shots at the White House, and it wasn’t discovered for days that he had reached the White House with the bullets. Can you walk me through what happened, and how the Secret Service failed to prevent that attack?

Abdallah Fayyad: Initially, the Secret Service deemed that as just a gunman outside the White House—that it was not targeted at the White House. And it actually took them days to find the damage to the White House done by the bullets fired at it. They only were able to find that evidence of damage after a housekeeper came to them because she noticed broken glass and cement as a result of one of the bullet holes.

One of the things about this incident that highlights problems of the Secret Service is, first and foremost, they clearly did not do a thorough sweep of the grounds in the immediate aftermath of that event. And the second problem with that incident was they also took days to raise the issue to their superiors. The president, for example, and the first lady did not learn of the gunman incident for days.

Do they get called on the carpet for that? If you’re president, you’re relying on these people to protect you. So, it’s a little awkward to yell at them and freak out but at the same time totally necessary. So, who did freak out? Did anyone freak out?

There was a lot of anger directed at the Secret Service. Michelle Obama, for example, was incredibly angry. Neither her nor the president were at the White House when shots were fired, but their daughters were.

After this incident happened, there’s a whole other incident where the Obamas had gone to Colombia on a visit. The Secret Service went with them. And they were sent back because they hired sex workers while they were there. And then in 2015, drunk agents crashed a car into the White House barricade. Like, all of this just seems to point to a toxic culture inside the agency.

There’s been a lot of reporting on the “frat boy” work culture at the Secret Service. If agents are behaving this way on trips, it does make you wonder whether or not they are actually capable of protecting the president, the vice president, and their families or candidates. And if they’re actually succeeding at their job, or if oftentimes, as was the case at the Trump rally, they’re getting lucky. Because it’s clear that what happened was not a situation where the president was saved because of the scale of the Secret Service but by sheer dumb luck that he is still alive.

There was also an incident after Jan. 6 that called into question how the people in charge of the Secret Service were operating, because right after the riot at the Capitol, Secret Service agents’ text messages were deleted, which is highly suspicious.

What happened on Jan. 6 has to be a huge stain and a big red flag for how the Secret Service is running itself and what the expectations of the Secret Service have been. In the days before Jan. 6, we don’t have a record of their agents’ text messages. They suspiciously deleted all the messages and then blamed it on some internal software change that the agency was undergoing. Even if that is true, is it not alarming that one of the most important security agencies in the country just lost so much of its data and can’t retrieve it?

I want to talk through what we do know about how the Secret Service failed to protect Donald Trump at his Butler County rally. First of all, when you lay out the facts of where the shooter was and how long he had to take aim at the former president, how many shots he was able to fire, it doesn’t seem like a sophisticated operation. It seems like something that was preventable. Can you walk me through all those details? 

There are a couple of details here that are really important for people to understand. Onlookers noticed that there was a man on the roof with a gun. He was also reported to local law enforcement, which helped the Secret Service secure the event. They noticed him on the roof with a gun, and Trump was still allowed to remain on the stage for over a minute after that was flagged. We also know that there were a dozen law enforcement snipers located in the building that the gunman was sitting atop.

They were inside, and he was on top. And the head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, said that their own agents weren’t on that roof because it was sloped and therefore dangerous, which is a strange response.

That is a very strange response. It makes you wonder whether or not the president should be allowed to be near buildings with sloped roofs if that’s their security protocol, that they just don’t go up on those roofs, which on its face just seems like a ridiculous thing. If a gunman can be on that roof, then so too can the Secret Service. In the aftermath of the rally as well, you saw the Secret Service try to pass on some of the blame to local law enforcement because they do work in conjunction to secure these events. And in the outside perimeter, local law enforcement was responsible. However, the commanding agency is the Secret Service at those events, even outside the perimeter.

Another detail that is very alarming for how the Secret Service secured that event itself is that the gunman was within 400 feet of the president with a gun—an AR-15–style rifle, which is very common to have among a lot of Americans, and that has a 600-foot range. If that is a common firearm in the United States, why is it that the outside perimeter was within firing range of that firearm?

There’s also this fact that Donald Trump had gotten increased Secret Service protection in the days leading up to this assassination attempt because of an unrelated plan by Iran to assassinate him. And this rally still unfolded the way it did. What does that tell you about how the Secret Service works and does what they have to do?

That’s part of the reason why I’m skeptical of the talking point that part of the failure is because they don’t have enough resources. They were aware of a threat. They had the resources to secure that event if they needed to secure it more. The question is whether they were actually paying attention and whether they were actually focused at keeping Trump protected or whether they were asleep at the wheel.

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Some of my listeners might hear our conversation and think, There are plenty of dangerous situations that the Secret Service is managing that we don’t know about. We only hear about it when they screw up. What would you say to someone who says that?

That’s a totally valid thing to say. But the reality is that we should have extremely high standards for all of our law enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service, and not simply just give them a pass when they fail, even if it’s very rare that they fail. When there are failures, law enforcement agencies have to be held accountable, and the Secret Service is no different. I don’t know if part of the reason they’re not transparent is because they worry about national security threats. I can understand why they don’t want to tell us about all the plots against former presidents or their projects. But part of that lack of transparency does lead us to not really understand the scale of failures that happen day in and day out or the scale of successes.

So, the head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, is out. But that’s not the only thing that’s changed in the past few days, because now Kamala Harris, a vice president, is running for president. And it strikes me we’re at this really fragile juncture. Protecting the first Black female candidate for the presidency is a big job. Is the Secret Service ready for that assignment?

People should be asking that question. What we do know is that, for example, Obama received more death threats than his predecessors, as the first Black president. So, chances are there is a lot of hatred, anger, resentment, and racism directed at Kamala Harris as she runs for office. And there is probably going to be, as we’ve seen in the alt-right and far-right circles, a larger and larger appetite for political violence. There is a lot more danger and a much bigger threat for presidential candidates, including and especially somebody like Kamala Harris right now, than maybe in the past.

Is removing Kimberly Cheatle a fix for these politicians who are now in the mix?

It’s absolutely not a fix. Having the Secret Service director resign is something that needs to be done for accountability, but that alone is not enough to fix its problems. Of course, there has to be a very thorough investigation over what happened at Trump’s rally, but lawmakers would be wrong to just focus on that rally. They have to zoom out. They have to look at how this agency has been managing itself. They have to look at all of its problems. They have to look at these past failures and see them as part of a pattern that hasn’t really been answered for at all.