The Daily - Inside an Unprepared Secret Service

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

After the assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump in Butler, Pa., Congress held hearings on the failures of the Secret Service, and its director, Kimberly Cheatle, stepped down.Weeks later, another man attempted to shoot the former president, increasing concerns that something had gone very wrong at the Secret Service.Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, explains why the agency’s failures are indicative of much more troubling issues.Guest: Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: An exodus of agents left the Secret Service unprepared for 2024.From July: The Secret Service has faced questions about its decisions before and immediately after the assassination attempt in Butler.From September: The Secret Service had not swept the area where a gunman lay in wait as Mr. Trump embarked on a short-notice golf outing.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Hey, it's Michael. We gave you a heads up about this last week, but as a reminder, or in case you didn't hear the episode, you might see some changes coming to the show this week. If you're like most people and you listen to us on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, you're going to notice that The Times is going to ask you to subscribe if you want full access to our podcasts, including The Daily. As we said, every day, our newest episode, That Day Show, will remain free to everyone listening everywhere.

And so will shows from the previous few days. But if you want full access to our past shows and full access to all the New York Times podcasts, like Ezra Klein, Modern Love, The Run-Up, The Interview, Hard Fork, you'll have to subscribe. We think the easiest thing to do is to become a subscriber to all of the New York Times. You get access to the newspaper, the games, the cooking app, and all of our podcasts. But if you don't want to subscribe to everything, you can get just an audio subscription.

So even though you don't have to subscribe to Hear the Daily, we genuinely hope that you'll consider this a way of supporting the work that we do here and supporting the journalists of The New York Times. We make this show for you, our listeners, and we couldn't do it without your support. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. After the assassination attempt on former President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Congress held hearings on the failures of the Secret Service. What exactly do you see as the core problem that led to your agency being outgunned by

a 20-year-old using his father's gun and acting on his own without a particularly sophisticated plan or technology? They questioned the actions of the agents that day and the agency's leadership. I think that we are waiting to determine exactly what those failures or failure was. Director Kimberly Cheadle struggled to provide answers and soon after stepped down. Weeks later, another man attempted to shoot the former president, increasing concerns that something had gone very wrong at the Secret Service.

The focus in Washington is now on the Secret Service. Does the agency need more funding or are there other shortcomings they need to address? Today, my colleague, Eric Lipton, on why the agency's recent failures are indicative of much more troubling issues. It's Monday, October 14th. Hi, Eric. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. So you have spent the last few months looking into the Secret Service, and that is an agency that I think for a lot of Americans represents the absolute most elite group of law enforcement officers. But it's an agency that it's come under real scrutiny after not one but two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump. So just to start, can you tell us what did you know about the Secret Service when you started this reporting? What was your impression of them?

I certainly knew the pop culture image of the Secret Service when you started this reporting? What was your impression of them? I certainly knew the pop culture image of the Secret Service, the Hollywood version of these men, mostly, and historically at least, in their suits and the earpieces and their guns who are willing to take a bullet to protect the president. But I didn't actually know very much at all about the interworkings of this agency. And as I started out on this, I began to wonder whether or not there were some systemic issues at the agency that helped explain why there was such security failures in Butler,

PA on July 13th. So for an agency that's supposed to be so impenetrable, it seems like a monumental reporting assignment to actually try to get in there and talk to people whose job is supposed to be so secretive. How did you go about trying to get inside and get people to talk to you about what some of the problems might be?

It was a pretty intimidating assignment, and I was sort of sitting there thinking, how am I gonna get inside? I started with a couple of leads from my colleagues who'd been covering the July 13th shooting, and they gave me the names and phone numbers of a few agents that they had interacted with. And I just started with those names, and I called them and began conversations. These were retired agents. Some of them had been out for quite a while.

But it began a process of, you know, one relationship led to another. And it was a daisy chain of phone calls where you are building trust with each person you speak with. And what I found was that, in fact, even though it's the secret service, that these are people that really wanted to talk and that they had a lot of admiration for the job, but at the same time,

a sense that they weren't sure they could really do the job because of all of the challenges that they were facing. And they wanted to talk about that. And just to take a step back for a second, can you just describe for us what is the job? What is the life cycle of a Secret Service agent? I mean, there are a few jobs anywhere where you have to be perfect and any imperfection when it comes to protecting the president means potentially the life of the president. And so on any given day, there can't be even the slightest errors in that line of work.

And so it does attract a certain type of a person. It's a very intense job. And it was something that I didn't know at all before I started on the story, but they have what they call phase one, phase two and phase three. And in all three of the phases of their career, they are helping provide protection to certain key figures in the government. Phase one, they typically are assigned to a field office in St. Louis or Chicago or Pittsburgh,

where the Secret Service has agents that are basically investigators that are looking at financial crimes. And they occasionally do protective detail when the president or some dignitary comes to town or provides surge capacity for special events. Phase two is when they get into the security detail. And this is usually like three to four or five years into their career.

And then they are on either the president's detail, which is the most elite, or the vice president's detail, or the former president's detail. They're in Chappaqua detail, which is the most elite, or the vice president's detail, or the former president's detail. They're in Chappaqua, you know, the Clintons, maybe Mar-a-Lago covering Trump, Jimmy Carter even, and that's phase two. Phase three, they graduate to becoming a boss or they're in one of the specialized units. They're overseeing the sharpshooters, they're a special agent in charge of a regional office, they're at the training center.

And so what I heard at each of the phases of their careers from these agents was that at every single level, there just would not enough people to do the job that they were expected. And why is that? Part of this is that the Secret Service in the last decade or so has been asked to cover more and more government officials, protectees they call them. The number of protectees went from 26 in 2015 to 59 in 2021. And that's because the president who has this authority kept adding more people to the Secret

Service list of those folks that they had to basically live next side to and be there at any moment to make sure that they were not going to be a subject of an attack. It goes back to Obama's tenure in the white house to Valerie Jarrett, one of the top officials during the Obama administration who was added to the list. And then there were so many people that the agency was tasked with covering during Trump's tenure. His adult children, the grandchildren, and top officials that he wanted the Secret Service to cover. And that was just more work for these agents, even though there were not necessarily more people to do the job. Yeah, I remember when Trump was in office, we would frequently read all these stories about how he was flying all over the world

with the Secret Service and with his children and staying at Trump properties and all of that seemed like and it was reported that it was putting a lot of strain on the agency. It was. There was a great deal of international travel, particularly by his adult children, and they were a very demanding family to follow and that put more work on the Secret Service. It was perhaps the greatest demand in modern times. And during Biden's administration, initially the number of protectees went down once the Trump family members came off the list.

But since then grew again, and it's now hit 42 people that are being protected. And they knew in 2023, as the 24 election was approaching, that this was going to be a crazy year. They had a NATO summit in Washington, D.C. that was planned. They had the RNC and the DNC conventions. But it wasn't just increasing demand for more people to protect. It also is an era of increased political violence and violent rhetoric and a sense that the

threat environment was much worse than it has historically been. The Secret Service was very much aware of that. Social media and the echo chamber of social media, it made their job much harder. So you have this looming crisis, which is a shortfall of agents, the growing demands of the job, the threats. How does all of this actually impact the agency? Well, there's a rush to make up for that shortfall. And the agents who are in the field on protection duty for the president and the vice president,

they're stretched pretty thin. So to bridge this gap, the agents are spending less time in phase one of their career, and they're being rushed more quickly into phase two, which is the protective work. And that's when they're protecting the president or other high level dignitaries full time. And not only that, agents who are helping protect the president are being asked to work longer hours,

and they often aren't being compensated properly because the Secret Service agencies have this federal salary cap. And so agents at times are filing for overtime, but they aren't being paid because they've hit the cap. It's kind of incredible to think that the Secret Service isn't paid for their work. Yeah, and that leads these agents to not only be exhausted, but sort of disgusted that there they are working for free. And the phase in which you're on the president's detail, that's the most grueling phase of an agent's career. They have no control over their schedule.

They spend really long hours away from home, and they're feeling completely burned out. At our request, actually, the Law Enforcement Association that represents these Secret Service agents did a survey to assess how they view the job. And again and again, we found this deep frustration with just how hard they were being worked in a sense that the bosses there didn't appreciate what they're being put through. And one of the agents I spoke with who had been assigned to travel to Asia to help protect President Trump before he left office, told me this story about how he was traveling on an Air Force cargo plane and the place that he was given to sleep was underneath the chains

that were holding the president's bulletproof limo in place. And there he was trying to sleep thinking to himself, I'm just part of the cargo here. He was 54 years old. He wasn't that mandatory retirement age. And he just said, I'm out, I'm done with this. And he retired. Wow. And the numbers are pretty dramatic. Over 1,400 agents and other employees of the Secret Service left in 2022 and 2023. And that's in an agency that had only approximately 7,700 people. So that's a pretty huge number. And what it meant was that the Secret Service was going backwards. It was shrinking.

It wasn't getting bigger as the 2024 election year was approaching. So what did the Secret Service do to try to address some of these problems? I mean, they intensified their recruitment efforts. They began to offer financial incentives and pay even more overtime to the remaining agents and to bring back some of the agents that had retired as rehired, annuitants they called them. And so those were two solutions

as to how to get their numbers up. That sounds on the surface at least logical because presumably it takes a very long time to train and vet these agents. So why wouldn't you just rehire people who already know how to do the job? Right. And it seemed like a smart plan. But in fact, what they found was that they were offering agents that you could keep your

pension and you could come back and get paid to do the job. And that was such an attractive thing that they started to incentivize people to retire early. So this program that was intended to get more agents into the field was actually kind of backfiring and encouraging agents to retire early, it sounds like. So essentially the agency is shooting itself in the foot here. Right. And not only that, but once these retired agents came back, they knew a bunch of former

friends who were now their bosses, and they were giving them desk jobs pretty far away from the task of protecting the president or other protectees. A number of them ended up in the field offices, like in the Miami field office, where I was told that one agent saw one of these rehired Inuitants painting the wall of the Miami field office and couldn't believe that this was like the highest paid painter in the United States government. And so they weren't actually getting much benefit from a number of these folks that were coming back.

So, Eric, you've explained all these different ways that the Secret Service has tried to tackle these problems you've described, but at the end of the day, they don't seem to be working. That's right. They were actually going backwards. They were losing more people than they were hiring. And the more that we dug into this, the more reporting that we did, the more that we realized that the problems were much deeper than simply attrition and the inability to hire enough

staff. That these were problems that were really fundamental to the entire agency's operations. We'll be right back. So, Eric, before the break, you said that your investigation into the Secret Service uncovered an even deeper set of problems. So tell us what you found. A big part of this is a lack of sufficient money and clout. For many years, the Secret Service was a part of the Department of Treasury, and the Treasury was really the big dog.

It was the largest law enforcement unit. But after 9-11, it was moved to the newly created Department of Homeland Security. And this was a huge change. Homeland Security is just this giant bureaucracy. It's got Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration Enforcement, TSA. It's just a giant agency. And the Secret Service became sort of an afterthought. And as a result, it was unable to effectively compete for the money that it needed

to equip and train its new hires. And so what's been the result of that? How has that actually hindered the agency's ability to do its job? Perhaps the biggest area that it's impacted is Secret Service training. The training facility that they have in suburban Maryland outside of Washington, it's in really pretty bad shape. A third of the buildings there, according to a consultant's study, they concluded they should just simply be demolished. There's a basement room where they train new hires how to fight if they encounter an assailant.

And that room floods routinely when there's heavy rain. The heating and air conditioning, I'm told, is pretty sporadic in some of these buildings. And at one point, the plumbing went out and they had to call off training altogether. And when they're training agents how to protect the president on Air Force one, they have this prop that they use. It's the front half of a retired plane that looks like it's from the 1960s. It's sort of sad to look at this thing and think that's what they're using. And when it comes to figuring out how to protect and defend the White House, they

don't even have a mock White House, they don't even have a mock White House that they can train around, even though they've been talking about building one for over a decade. Okay, wait a second. Are you telling me that some of the people that actually have to guard the White House have never been inside the White House or inside anything that resembles the White House? That's right. That's what the Homeland Security Secretary had told us himself, that some of the uniformed officers had never been inside the White House. The Secret Service is so short on

proper training facilities that they actually sent on several occasions their personnel down to the Atlanta area to train at a mock White House that Tyler Perry, the Hollywood producer, had built as a stage there in Georgia. That cannot be true. Yeah, it's hard to believe, but that's what the Secret Service has been left with as its options for training its people. I mean, back in 2014, after an assailant got over the fence and into the White House, began a conversation that they needed a proper training facility so that the uniform officers knew what the building was like, that they were being assigned to defend. It's been over a decade and still the money has not been appropriated to build this training

facility at their site in Maryland. And you've got to wonder why. Why has it not gotten the money that it needs to properly train its own people? So why did this get to this point? How could the agency that is in charge of protecting the president end up relying on Tyler Perry's White House? You know, the Secret Service Acting Director didn't say this, but what I heard from other agents and other former bosses was that the reality is that the Department of Homeland Security

is fixated with the southern border. And when it has money, it's spending money to try to protect the border and prevent more people from crossing the border. And that that is the political imperative for the Department of Homeland Security, not to build a training center for Secret Service agents and officers.

But on top of all of this, what we found is that there are even more cultural tensions at the agency, particularly relating to how they hire and promote people that were causing even more turmoil. There is a perception that promotions are not simply based on merit at the Secret Service, that too frequently it has to do with who you know. And that was a source of great frustration for agents and for officers. And another reason why they would say,

you know what, I just wanna go work somewhere else. For example, the guy that is in charge of the uniform division, one of the biggest parts of the Secret Service, the folks that protect the White House, they also are the sharpshooters that protect the president. The chief of the uniform division, in addition to doing that job, he was moonlighting as a real estate

agent in Maryland. Wow. And his clients included officers that reported to him. So he was both their boss and he was being paid as a real estate agent by them. And then he was promoting some of these same people. I was just startled at that. I mean it was such a conflict of interest. It so undermines the whole merit promotion process that you have a financial relationship with your subordinate and then you promote that person. And there were people were joking to me that they figured out that the best way to get a promotion was to buy a house with this chief. And that was the kind of jokes that were going around

at the Secret Service. And as we got copies of his real estate transactions, and we were able to see that there on the list were several of the folks that worked for him, and we were able to document that this was true. And we presented that information to the Secret Service and said, is this really happened? Were you aware of this?

And for the first time, they acknowledged that they were aware of it, that they had asked for an inspector general investigation, but none of this was ever made public. So, Eric, you and our colleague, David Ferenfold, have spent months reporting on this agency, and you've uncovered this institution that has essentially been fighting for resources for years. And the culture just sounds like it's broken at this point. So what is the fix here? For years, the culture at the Secret Service has been you ride your horse until it dies

and then you eat it. You hear that same line from different agents there, still today. But in order for the Secret Service to turn this corner, it's going to have to change that. It's going to have to hire enough personnel so that its staff is not overworked. It's going to have to bring in sufficient technology so that it can do its job with the most advanced tools possible. You know, the Secret Service Acting Director has said that there's a new paradigm, that the agency must transition, and that it needs significantly more personnel and technology to do its job. He's saying that as to whether or not it will get the resources and will have the

leadership to deliver on that is an open question. Eric, you've spoken to so many agents. Since the story came out, have you heard from any of them? What has their reaction been? Yeah, I heard from quite a number of agents that were appreciative that we put this all out there on the record. I think that there's a belief that if they had more personnel and better equipment that the incident in Butler would not have played out as it did. The publication of our story to some extent was a relief to see all of these embarrassing insider moments out in the open and a certain hopefulness that maybe this means that it's time that they're going to be confronted, but also a certain skepticism that the Secret Service is really ready to

confront the changes that it needs to make in order to do the job in this violent era that we now live in. Well, Eric, thank you very much. Thank you. On Saturday, a man was arrested and accused of illegal weapons possession as he was trying to enter a Trump rally in Coachella, California. The man, identified by local law enforcement as Vem Miller of Nevada, had gotten through an outer ring of security as he drove in. He was eventually stopped by police

before President Donald Trump arrived and was later released on bail. Reached by the Southern California News Group on Sunday, Miller identified himself as a Trump supporter and said that he was shocked at the arrest. In a joint statement with the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI, the Secret Service said it had determined that the incident did not impact protective operations and that the former president was, quote, not in any danger. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday, the United States military said it's sending an advanced missile defense system to Israel, along with about 100 American troops to operate it.

This is the first deployment of U.S. forces to Israel since the October 7 attacks. The system will help defend Israel from ballistic missiles, like the ones Iran fired at it on October 1st. And... 3, 2, 1... Early Sunday morning, SpaceX landed a rocket booster back onto its own launch site in Texas, a technical feat that brings the company one step closer to founder Elon Musk's ambitious plan to make completely reusable space rockets. We are go for catch.

As it fell out of the sky at supersonic speeds, the returning rocket booster set off sonic booms before returning to its platform on Earth. NASA hopes to use a SpaceX rocket during two upcoming missions that will take astronauts to the moon. Today's episode was produced by Olivia Natt, Asta Chathurvedi, Nina Feldman, Stella Tan, and Ricky Nowetzki. It was edited by Mike Benoit, Mark George, and Chris Haxel. Contains original music by Marian Lozano and Alicia Be'etoop, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.