12
Prior to the inauguration, Trump and his aides debated whether he and his family should emerge from their limousines during the inaugural parade from the steps of the Capitol to the White House. The Secret Service assured Trump that he would be safe.
As with previous inaugurations going back to Jimmy Carter’s, agents chose locations where Trump and his family could emerge from their limousines far away from office buildings. The Secret Service could station countersniper teams and counterassault teams armed with semiautomatic Stoner SR-16 rifles and flash-bang grenades for diversionary tactics at locations flanked by federal office buildings, such as FBI headquarters.
The presidential limousine, known as “the Beast,” is a 2009 Cadillac put into service for Barack Obama’s inauguration. The Beast lives up to its moniker. Built on top of a GMC truck chassis, the vehicle is armor-plated, with bulletproof glass and its own supply of oxygen. It is equipped with state-of-the-art encrypted communications gear. It has a remote starting mechanism and a self-sealing gas tank. The vehicle can keep going even when the tires are shot out. It can take a direct hit from a bazooka or grenade. The car’s doors are eighteen inches thick, its windows five inches thick. The latest model has larger windows and greater visibility than the Cadillac first used by President Bush for his January 2005 inauguration.
But, as I told Trump at Mar-a-Lago just before New Year’s Eve, the Secret Service could not guarantee that if he emerges from the Beast, he would not be a target of drones armed with explosives or biological or radiological weapons. While screened with metal detectors, individuals in crowds along the route could have secreted plastic explosives or biological or radiological weapons.
When I urged Trump not to emerge from his limo, the president turned to his detail leader standing beside him and asked him what he thought. Predictably, the agent assured Trump that the Secret Service could handle any problem. Back and forth Trump went between me and the agent, quizzing us on the possible threat.
While most aides were against it, Bannon pushed for the president to emerge from his limo.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to walk down the street,’ ” Bannon says. “I was a big advocate of that. I was a little surprised it actually happened because I didn’t think it was going to happen because so many guys had said, don’t do that. But then he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll walk down the street. Look at Melania. She looks so amazing, and she will be fantastic. I’ll be fine.’ ”
Looking strong and tough is a big secret to Trump’s success, Bannon says.
“Not backing down, not being weak,” Bannon says. “The worst thing you can tell Trump is that he’s weak.”
Although more briefly than at previous inaugurations, Trump and his family twice got out of their limousines to walk along the parade route. But two months later, evidence emerged that the Secret Service was shockingly inept and could not be trusted to assure anyone of his or her safety.
At 11:38 p.m. on March 10, 2017, surveillance video recorded a man jumping a fence near the Treasury Building next to the White House security fence. He hid behind a White House pillar before heading for the South Portico. The man, identified as Jonathan T. Tran from Milpitas, California, even peered into a White House window before Secret Service Uniformed Division officers, who guard the White House, recognized what was happening. For more than sixteen minutes, the twenty-six-year-old wandered on the White House grounds. Wearing a backpack, he was armed with two cans of Mace.
Asked if he had a pass, Tran said, “No, I am a friend of the president. I have an appointment,” according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. Tran carried a letter addressed to Trump, who was in the White House at the time.
The letter mentioned “Russian Hackers” and said he had relevant information. Tran wrote that his “phone and email communications [had been] read by third parties,” and that he had “been called schizophrenic.”
Until CNN broke the story a week after the intrusion, the Secret Service covered up what had really happened. When announcing Tran’s arrest, the agency never mentioned the embarrassing fact that Tran had managed to wander the White House grounds for more than sixteen minutes before being caught. In the same way, the Secret Service lied when announcing the arrest of Omar J. Gonzalez in 2014, claiming he had not penetrated the White House itself and was not armed. In fact, he had penetrated all the way into the White House and was armed with a knife.
At least a dozen times a year, intruders try to jump the reinforced steel fence around the White House. Typically, half of them actually succeed in entering the White House grounds before Secret Service Uniformed Division officers take them down with dogs or, if they refuse to put down their weapons, kill them. But until September 19, 2014, no intruder had succeeded in scaling the seven-foot, eight-inch-high fence and making it into the White House itself.
Underscoring the agency’s arrogance, then-Secret Service director Julia Pierson claimed that uniformed officers exercised “tremendous restraint” in not killing Gonzalez. In doing so, she appeared to think that the public could be duped into accepting the Secret Service’s failure as a success. But the agency was not fooling the FBI. Senior FBI officials were horrified by the handling of the matter and found laughable the Secret Service’s effort to cover up its own failure by brazenly hailing the officers’ “restraint.”
Gonzalez not only entered the White House but was able to run through most of the main floor, passing by the staircase to the residence portion and entering the East Room. Finally, a uniformed officer managed to tackle Gonzalez and take him to the ground near a door to the Green Room on the south side of the White House.
Pierson approved statements saying that Gonzalez had been quickly detained at the door and that a search determined he was unarmed. The statements were false. When arrested, Gonzalez was armed with a knife.
In the more recent incident, if Tran had been armed with explosives or weapons of mass destruction, the intrusion could have resulted in President Trump’s assassination. A Secret Service investigation that was never made public found that, besides officers who were not paying attention during the latest intrusion, sensors around the White House grounds had been turned off because squirrels or birds were triggering them and they were considered a nuisance. Other sensors had been relocated to save money.
“We make do with less” is part of a Secret Service culture that has led to one scandal after another. Since the Department of Homeland Security took it over from the Treasury Department in 2003, the Secret Service has had a lax, corner-cutting, cover-up management culture that punishes the agency’s brave and dedicated agents for reporting problems and telling the truth about the agency’s many deficiencies and promotes agents who ignore the problems and reassure presidents like Trump that they are safe.
Indeed, nothing has changed within the Secret Service since the party-crashing Salahis went prancing into the White House state dinner back in 2009, or since I broke the Secret Service prostitution scandal in 2012, or since Gonzalez was able to penetrate all the way into the White House armed with a knife before being apprehended in 2014. Going back even further to 1981, under pressure from Reagan White House staffers, the Secret Service allowed unscreened spectators to get within fifteen feet of Reagan as he left the Washington Hilton, enabling John W. Hinckley Jr. to shoot him and almost take the president’s life. Given the laxness and cover-up culture, agents say it’s a miracle there has not already been a recent assassination.
On April 25, 2017, Trump appointed Randolph D. “Tex” Alles to be the twenty-fifth director of the Secret Service. Pushed by General John F. Kelly, then secretary of Homeland Security and later White House chief of staff, the appointment seemed ideal. Alles had both federal law enforcement and military experience, having been a major general in the Marine Corps and then-acting deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Trump had had another nominee in mind, George Mulligan, a sharp veteran agent who is chief operating officer of the Secret Service. But “General Kelly wanted him [Alles] in the worst way, and nobody else wanted him,” Bannon says.
When he interviewed Alles, Trump was not impressed. Alles volunteered that he knew next to nothing about the Secret Service. Apparently it was too much trouble to read books and articles about the agency or to check out the Secret Service website before meeting with the president. Agents are also unimpressed by Alles and largely ignore him. Alles seems more interested in making friends with agents than fixing the problems that plague the once-proud agency. Apparently co-opted by Secret Service management, Alles proved to be the exact opposite of what was needed to reform the Secret Service.
Alles not only retained the same senior management that produced so many scandals, he has done nothing to change the agency’s culture that has led to those scandals and the low morale that results in a shockingly high turnover rate.
Despite the chief recommendation of President Obama’s own Department of Homeland Security blue ribbon four-person panel that he appoint a director from outside the agency to change the culture and shake up the agency, Obama chose Joe Clancy, a veteran agent, who did nothing to change that culture. Indeed, Clancy proudly proclaimed in November 2014 after the Gonzalez intrusion that the Secret Service would have a new, more secure fence built around the White House in three years. That fence has yet to be built. In contrast, six months after Trump took office, contractors were offering prototypes for the wall to be built on the southern border.
While Alles indeed came from outside the agency, instead of reforming it, he left its failings intact. As I wrote in The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents, when the White House announced Clancy’s appointment as director, “Obama guaranteed that the Secret Service would continue to lurch from one security lapse to another.” Instead of one man wandering the White House grounds for sixteen minutes with two cans of Mace, thirty al-Qaeda or ISIS terrorists could have penetrated the White House grounds armed with explosives and WMD.
The latest intrusion was the result of Obama’s and Trump’s failure to heed the warnings of the DHS panel. If Alles ever read those recommendations, he has ignored them.
The media made much of the extra costs of protecting Trump family members and covering the president on trips. For a family trip in June 2017, Don Trump Jr. and his wife, Vanessa, dropped protection for their family, which includes five children. Vanessa was said to be annoyed at the headache of coordinating the children’s schedules with their Secret Service details. But after the trip, their Secret Service protection remained intact. That left forty-one Trump aides and family members under protection, the same number as under Obama. In reporting on the costs, the media rarely mentioned that during his eight years in office, the cost of Obama’s Secret Service and Air Force travel expenses came to $106 million, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch.
At one point, Alles actually proposed the possibility of saving money by withdrawing Secret Service protection of some Trump family members and some aides unless they had actually received a threat. Throughout history, none of the assassinations or assassination attempts has been preceded by a threat.
The entire cost of the Secret Service is roughly two billion dollars a year, about the cost of one Stealth bomber. About a third of the budget is devoted to investigations of financial crimes, and the rest goes for protection of the president, vice president, their families, the White House, national security events like inaugurations, and visiting foreign leaders. Given that an assassination nullifies an election, it’s a small price to pay for protecting democracy.
One of the Secret Service’s failings is its ingrained attitude that “we make do with less.” Instead of reversing that attitude, Alles had bought into it. Instead of visualizing what it would be like if al-Qaeda or ISIS took Ivanka Trump hostage, Alles was worried about deploying some of the agency’s thirty-two hundred agents to protect her.
Horrified White House staff immediately shot down Alles’s proposal to cut back on protection. Especially given the hatred directed at Trump and his family, the idea that the director of the Secret Service would entertain dropping protection of the president’s family members is itself a scandal and all anyone needs to know about why Alles should be replaced before a tragedy occurs.