 Welcome. I'm Elizabeth Christian. I am CEO of Elizabeth Christian Public Relations and a Vice Chair of the LBJ Foundation. On behalf of the LBJ Foundation and the LBJ Library, it's my pleasure to welcome you here tonight for an evening with. Tonight, we are really lucky to have with us Carol Linnig. Ms. Linnig has just written a book about the Secret Service and our good friend Evan Smith, CEO and founder of the Texas Tribune, is going to be interviewing her tonight about this. What we know is that Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson had the highest possible esteem for the Secret Service. Dwight Eisenhower called them soldiers without a uniform. And yet, over the last couple of decades, the reputation of the Secret Service has taken a beating. I'm hoping that Evan and Carol can really get down to what has happened with the service and what can be done to fix it. So now please join me in welcoming Carol Linnig and Evan Smith. Carol, good to be with you. Congratulations on the book. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here with you, Evan. Thank you. Well, it's my pleasure. Look, the book is great. It's not only a great read, but I learned a lot. Honestly, I'm embarrassed as a political junkie and a history buff. I feel like I should have known more of this than I did. Let me off the hook. How much of this did you know before researching this book? I have to say, you know, I really got into this beat by accident looking at something in 2012, a terrible scandal. I was really shocked. Almost every time I delved into another presidency and there was something new to learn. Sometimes it was heroism. Sometimes it was, you know, security debacle. Yeah. Now, as you say, this was an outgrowth of your reporting for the post on a presidential trip to South America in 2012. We'll get to that. I want to ask you generally, what about that story struck a chord? Obviously, not everything you write for the paper has a book in it. The Secret Service story, I mean, when I was drawn into this in 2012 at least, it was just the two sides of this coin. You know, these heroic patriots who we all think are the elite of the elite or we had this Hollywood impression buttoned down super fit sunglasses. But as I did more and more reporting about them, I was finding out there was a lot of seriously concerning stuff, you know, that they are willing to take a bullet for the president, but a lot of time they were dodging a bullet. A lot of time they were covering up not the secrets of the president, but their own mishaps, their own, their own misconduct. Something I was left thinking about was the media environment where we're in today. You know, the Carolinics of the world tell us everything. So we don't have to wonder whether we're getting the whole story. We see both the visible part of the iceberg and the submerged part. But you know, in times past, when there were not Carolinics and there were not as many places to get news, there were not as many enterprising reporters. I wonder if that's partly what saved these guys in the old days is that there was just no one to do the digging and to report on this because as you say, all this stuff was there and you're revealing it in a way that for us, we're hearing for the first time. But I think it's because nobody was there to tell us before, right? I mean, I think there were some excellent reporters back in the day, but there is also a little bit of a gentleman's agreement. You know, we didn't cover presidents in the sort of microscopic, proctological way we do now. You know, President Kennedy, a lot of reporters knew that he was often trotting off on business trips, really partially to meet women. Right, business trips. Yeah, that were not his wife. And a lot of people knew what was happening behind that curtain, that what he was doing in the swimming pool at the White House when Jackie was away. But we, you know, the Secret Service agents saw something really, really disconcerting because while they weren't judging him morally, they were judging him on a security reason. They felt like he was taking his life in his own hands. The way he was interacting with people he didn't know, the women that were unscreened that were, you know, on the other side of the door at a hotel room that the agents couldn't see or screen. Or in some cases, being ushered into the White House by a friend of the President's. I mean, that's something we'll come to, the Kennedy story is one of many that I want to be sure we get into here. But let me stay still kind of far back from this and ask generally, as you say yourself in the prologue, you didn't go into this with a conclusion about the Secret Service intending to prove it right or yourself right with your reporting. But you did go into it with a point of view. And again, that was shaped in large part by the 2012 experience. Absolutely. You know, I thought, Evan, when I dug into the Cartagena Mass, which again, you know, I was asked to help because I'm a digger and I convinced people to talk to me and tell me their truths. Yeah, I thought that was going to be the biggest deal in the world. The most humiliating scandal in a hundred years for the Secret Service. But those agents that I met over and over again, so many different ones that I met as a result of that reporting and their family members and their friends and officers, they had a much more horrifying story to tell that was more important than boys gone wild in South America. And that was that they thought a president was going to be killed on their watch. Right. And so in some ways, telling the story is the best way for them to cleanse themselves or cleanse their guilt and maybe to cleanse the Secret Service, right, getting it out there. They really didn't believe that their leadership and they'd been through several directors. They didn't believe their leadership was listening to them. Yeah, they believe that, you know, the alpha male DNA of this agency is both amazingly capable of doing heroic and unthinkable things, such sacrifice with their lives. But that DNA also doesn't admit weakness, doesn't admit that the agency is stretched too thin and that its security system is really Swiss cheese right now. Yeah, well, multiple things can be true at once. They can be both heroes and also be in need of some kind of fix. So you interviewed 180 people roughly for this book. And it sounds to me like many of them were happy to talk to you as long as you didn't identify them. How do you feel about the need to rely as you did for this book on anonymous sources? Well, unfortunately, in this instance, it was absolutely necessary. Agents who are currently on duty and officers will lose their jobs if they speak to me without permission. And so I have to admit and say with great sadness that there are agents who have lost their jobs for talking to me. So anonymity is is crucial for them. And on top of that, even former agents wanted to be on background because of the backlash that they would get from sort of the alumni network that still wants to burnish the image of a perfect impenetrable secret service and is not willing to look out for the current team that is, you know, fighting really against the odds and needs help. Well, as a working reporter, and especially for a paper like The Post, where you are called upon to rely on anonymous sources to tell us all things that we absolutely need to know, you understand the tension there because so many people distrust the media if they see anonymous sources, then they're given permission not to believe what they're reading. And you just have to accept that as part of the bargain. Yes, although in this book and in my reporting, but especially in this book, it is the beneficiary of copious documents. For example, in the Cartagena episode, I can tell you down to the number of mojitos and beers that certain agents had because someone gave me all the internal investigation documents. So many of these agents submitted to me their calendars, their schedules, their contemporaneous texts and notes. And then they were backed up by, again, internal documents. So you alluded to what the premise of this book is that this storied organization is stretched too thin that it's drowning in new missions. There are great security risks. There's distrust between leadership and rank and file. I would also add, as we see repeatedly, like so much of government, they're operating off of outdated technology, outmoded technology that doesn't keep up with what they maybe need in the modern world. There's a frat boy culture. There is an aspect of this in which the service has been drawn into political matters and you want to hope that the service is apolitical, but maybe that's too much to ask and that people hate working there. That's kind of the part that I thought was most remarkable. You say it finds itself in a state of unprecedented peril. Shouldn't we all fear for the country under those circumstances? I mean, the Secret Service, leave aside the myth of the Secret Service as a practical matter. They're protecting the most important people in this country. And if they're in this bad of shape, shouldn't we all be concerned? You couldn't have said it better. I mean, and indeed, you voice exactly what my sources told me, agent after agent, officer after officer. Why did they come to me? Why did they risk their careers? Why did they put something on the line like this? Because all of the warning signs that they know from history were flaring before Kennedy was killed are flaring now outdated technology, stretched to thin staff, people back in the day. And I interviewed luckily some of Kennedy's agents. A few of them died in the course of me working on this project. They said they knew they were treading water. They knew they were in trouble. They knew they couldn't keep up. And that's what agents are telling us now. Are we going to wait and see until another disaster? Are we going to pay attention and do something for them? Of course, that's 50 years ago. I mean, that's the thing that's extraordinary is that it's been allowed to continue despite the fact that it is absolutely not a not a new problem. So as I'm reading this book, I'm thinking to myself, what does success look like for the Secret Service? What is the job of these brave men and women? Dick Kaiser, who is the special agent in charge of protection, a special agent for Nixon and Ford says in the book, is quoted as saying in the book, for me, it's just you've got to keep them safe. Right. I mean, this reduces to the old hashtag you had one job. The one job of these guys is you got to keep the principles safe. Really, nothing else is more important than that. And it's so vital. I mean, the reason the agency matters to me after learning so much about it is it's vital to the democracy, right? If the president is killed, everyone who was alive at the time remembers Kennedy's death. Well, if you think it was a gut punch to the country, you can't imagine how bad it was for the Secret Service because it was Job 1. But on top of on top, this is one of the things that's the problem with the mission. On top of Job 1, there are 40 more people that the Secret Service protects. You know, the agency is now protecting vice president's stepchildren and president's grandchildren and on top of cabinet secretaries. So, you know, it's a huge mission, plus they're doing cybersecurity and hacking and financial crimes. They're they're protecting Super Bowls. They're protecting Olympics. I mean, you know, every single event doesn't involve the president. They're they're still there. So as one DHS, forgive me, as one senior cabinet member told me this agency needs a refresh about mission. We have to we have to match up its mission and the tools with what we actually the money and the tools we give them because right now they cannot accomplish what they're given. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about the as you take that off the how broad the mission is and how many things that's come to incorporate. It's easy to forget that back when the Secret Service came into existence, it really started as a counterfeit squad, right? And at the time of Abraham Lincoln and it evolved only after McKinley was assassinated into the into the body that we know it is the entity that it is today. Initially, the purpose of the Secret Service was not to protect the principles. It was much more mundane. So mundane, you know, basically it starts after Lincoln with the idea that, you know, there's all this counterfeit money. And, you know, we've got to deal with counter two thirds, I think, of the paper floating around after in the last year of the Civil War was fake. So, you know, there's a myth that the Secret Service was authorized by President Lincoln the day that he was shot. Actually, the ideal was discussed with his Secretary of Treasury and and then launched not long after his assassination. But three more presidents would be assassinated before the Secret Service would take over the role of guarding the principle, guarding the person who's the the leader of the free world. And the reason was we're so American, right? We don't want a Praetorian Guard. We don't want a Royal Palace. The public were coiled at that. And presidents didn't think that the taxpayers slash voting public would cotton to this. But, you know, after McKinley was killed in forgive me, in upstate New York, in Buffalo, finally, people started to say, you know what, this many presidents killed. Maybe we should actually protect them. There were so many things I learned from your book about the service. That's one of them. Another is that the service has grown so much over the last six decades from 300 agents and a five million dollar budget to 7000 agents and a two point two billion dollar annual budget, extraordinary growth. I didn't know that the first and only Secret Service officer to die while protecting a president was during an assassination attempt on Harry Truman. I'm not even sure I knew that there was an assassination attempt, Carol, on Harry Truman. Leslie Cauffield goes down in history now as the one and only, right? And you just mentioned, you know, that the mission of the service has has been expanded to do things like protect the vice president. The idea that that was not part of this charge from the very beginning is extraordinary. I mean, could you imagine Kamala Harris in this country at this moment without a protective detail? No, I can't. I can't, you know, it took the assassination of Robert Kennedy while he was campaigning and looking like he was heading to become president for Lyndon B Johnson, actually, to just announce overnight. And then that's actually a really chilling moment. Literally in the middle of the night calls up the director of the Secret Service and says, I want details on every single candidate candidate right now. Right. So candidates got protection. There's family members, as you say. I mean, all the protection of the service has been expanded to so many people. You know, Carol, I didn't know until I read this book that Arthur Bremmer, who shot George Wallace, actually had wanted to kill Richard Nixon first and was and was thwarted. I mean, you know, and that's actually a good story for the Secret Service. Like, you know, he, Bremmer wrote in his in his in his journal that he was trying to get Nixon, but it was too tricky. A tricky dick was too tricky to get. He was struggling because those Secret Service men, he said, they just made it too hard for him to get a close enough shot. So good for them. You know, Kennedy Kennedy's assassination really made them rebuild that agency from the ground up, rigorous training, amazing security net. But it's been slipping for the last couple of decades. I was not aware of something that you refer to in this book called the Exceptional Case Study Project. This is where an analysis was done of 83 people who attacked or came close to attacking prominent American public figures between 1949 and 1996. They're not all presidents, but that's an awful lot of instances of attempts. Many more than I knew or than I think we probably remember. And the point made, among others in this study, is that many of them were about wanting fame. This was not about political ideologies, right? So so something we learn about the Secret Service in this book for sure is that they've really got a much tougher job than even we know, because there are so many more attempts that we probably read about, right? So many. I mean, even before Obama, President Obama was running for office, Barack Obama, who kind of set the record for the number of threats. There are thousands per month that are registered in one way or another, maybe in a bar, somebody on a stool, a little bit, had too many to drink, says he's going to kill the president to just an email or, you know, or more frighteningly, in a white supremacist, you know, chatter group, somebody writes what they're planning to do. Or more often, as was true in the Exceptional Case Study, a person with some mental struggles or maybe in a crisis, mental health state decides that the way for them to solve their problems is to kill a president. And everybody has to be taken seriously. That's the point is you don't know whether somebody who just sends an email is a serious threat or not. You've got to investigate everything. A number of times in this book, Carol, we hear more agents, more agents, more agents. We need more agents. And there are a number of anecdotes that you recount in which the service itself or others go to Congress and they go to they say, we need more agents. The problem is we're understaffed. Is that necessarily after all your reporting? Have you concluded the answer to a better Secret Service? Is it volume more agents would make for a better service? In some ways, yes, but in other ways, it's too simplistic. Yeah. As we as you pointed out, the mission is enormous. It's gotten larger and larger. We keep adding to the pile of what the Secret Service is responsible for. On the other hand, right, you can't not protect Kamala Harris. You can't not protect the vice president and the president's family, right? You have to protect those people. So those duties are understandable. But the mission creep is enormous. The other thing is technology. They are so like late 1900s in terms of what they have for tools at their disposal. Some things have been upgraded, but, you know, even in 2017, when Donald Trump was just a few months into his presidency, you know, they had another jumper incident where the person got over five different fences and was on the grounds for 15 minutes without being interrupted. Jiggled the door on the east wing to get in and wandered around. Again, no one catching him. Why? Because the cameras, the fence line, the the alarms, the sensors, so many parts of it were failing. So, you know, this can't be the most protected 18-acre compound if all those things were on the fritz. Well, so there's that problem. I mean, it's not simply about the number of Asians, but you also have this kind of more. I think of this kind of more work a day problem, which is that sometimes the people who are being protected by the Secret Service don't want them around. You know, I kept thinking to myself while I was reading this book, the number of people who protect these who refuse to be protected or don't want to be protected. I mean, you use the case of John Kennedy, which is the most extreme case of somebody who was trying to cut and run or to leave his details so he could go off and have his adventures. But there are other people in this book who seem to object. I mean, President Johnson, right, who just don't really like the imposition of the even though they know that the purpose of having them around is to protect them, they would just assume not be protected. That's another point of tension. Absolutely. I'm so glad you brought it up. President Johnson, it makes me chuckle a little bit because he actually threatened and one time did shoot out the tire of a Secret Service agent's car, a follow up car behind him on his farm in Texas. And he kept threatening to shoot it because he said, you know, you guys need to get back away from me. I'm hunting out here and you're messing it up. You're getting in the way. Right. Exactly. But there was another thing about Johnson and Kennedy, too, in terms of them wanting these agents away, separate from John F. Kennedy's, you know, romantic. That's right. Yeah, but separate from that. The other reason was they didn't think the American public wanted a lot of Secret Service guards around their president. They wanted to feel like they were every man who who waded into a crowd, normal Joe, say hello to their voters. And if you had a bunch of security around you, it gave the impression you needed to be protected from your own public and they didn't like that. And they thought taxpayers would be ticked off about it. So Linda B. Johnson, for example, constantly trying to cut the Secret Service budget or at least his detail because he thought voters didn't like it. But isn't there something fundamentally ridiculous about that? We'd rather have a live president with too many people around him than a dead president. I mean, the fact is that the job of the Secret Service is to protect the president. And I mean, I find it remarkable that the taxpayers won't like this argument holds any water. I'm a little bit more sympathetic to the argument that, well, we want to have private lives. And so whether it's John Kennedy or Michelle Obama, we want the Secret Service to leave us to have our private lives and not to impose in the way that they might. I mean, it has the word secret in it, but of course they do work for us. So that tension, that idea that the culture of the place may be steeped in deference and discretion, but at the same time, they may also reveal the secrets of a president or of the first family is that's going to be a concern, no matter what, right? And you know, there have been some presidents that have had better relationships with the Secret Service than others, right? So, you know, the Bushes had an incredible relationship with their Secret Service details, treated them like family. Barbara Bush always running out with some hot coffee. Bringing food, right. Bringing the food from the leftover from the party. Right. I mean, even to the point of telling a detail leader for her husband that she wanted him to wear, you know, her husband's hat and mittens because it was cold outside. Very motherly attention and actually welcomed, right? But when the Clintons arrived, they weren't so sure about these agents looking out for them. And in fact, within the first few weeks, a story leaked in the papers about Hillary Clinton and throwing a lamp, her husband, in an argument, right? So after that, she's like, okay, it turns out these agents, like the Bush is better than us. And I don't want them in our, I don't want them right up on the second floor of our house. They're gonna need to stay downstairs. Well, and in fact, the issue of the Secret Service's relationship with the Clintons and this notion of deference and all that comes to a head during the Star Investigation, right? When the question of whether the Secret Service will tell what they saw on the Lewinsky matter. I mean, again, it hadn't occurred to me that the Secret Service would be put in the position of having to play that kind of role. Maybe I knew it at the time, but I forgot it. But again, your book in extraordinary detail, it's such a compelling story. Let's get into some presidencies if you don't mind and let's talk about some of the stuff that you present to us. Obviously, the Kennedy assassination is the one that a lot of people think about. We have this image of the Secret Service in Dealey Plaza and we think about everything that happened on that day and after. Again, under the heading of I think maybe I knew this but I forgot it or maybe I just didn't know it. I didn't fully appreciate that Jackie Kennedy blamed the Secret Service. Bill Greer, the driver of the limousine who was an agent in the service, you have Jackie in this book saying basically if only he had done XYZ differently, maybe that wouldn't have happened. That's extraordinary to me. I mean, this widow, you know, with the blood still on her beautiful pink suit. Is holding on to her husband's brain parts as they arrive at Parkland Hospital. I mean, literally clutching, literally clutching a piece of his skull and brain. Holding them and hands them to a doctor when she gets into the emergency room. You can't put this president back together again. There were some doctors who thought there was a chance but not many but she is this amazing figure of like I'm gonna hold it together for the country which she did for many, many days. But in her private moments, she shares that tap on the break that Bill Greer, the agent of the limo in which she is riding with her husband, that tap on the break in the plaza upon hearing the first shot come through the right side of everybody's ears is likely the reason that Hink forgive me is likely the reason that Oswald was able to get a third and fatal shot that went directly into the jaw and ear of the president and did result in a part of his brain splattering on the backseat. Right, but of course the contrast to that would be the assassination attempt, the assassination of Ronald Reagan where unlike Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan after the fact says the agent saved him. I mean, she believed that actually the system worked exactly as it was supposed to. So rather than recriminations, she felt like had it not been for the agents that he might have actually he might have actually succumbed. Absolutely, and you know what? That heroic moment, so many levels of heroism and smart split second trigger reflexes on the part of the Secret Service that is the result of the rebuilding after the gut punch of Kennedy's death. You know, the director Rowley put everything that he has into getting the money, getting the agents, getting the technology, all of that upgrade happens and his choices and the choices of the directors that follow him are completely vindicated by the split second decision of Tim McCarthy to throw his arms up and his chest up and take incoming bullets from John Hinckley or the split second decision of Reagan's detail leader on that square outside the Hilton. As soon as he hears shots, there's no like tap the breaker, let's look. He puts his hand on his shoulders and shoves the president's car. Shoves him into the car, 70 year old man shoves him into the car, lands on top of him. Reagan actually at one point thinks before he knows that he's been shot, he thinks that his rib is broken because he's having problems breathing. And that's in part because the guy smothered him essentially in the car, but he saved his life. He saved his life and the agent behind him, Ray Shaddick, who literally folded up, I don't know if he was gonna break the legs or not, but he folded up the legs of the agent behind him, Jerry Parr, who was on top of the president so that they could slam the limo door shut and evacuate immediately. I mean, it was like a Vietnam evac, unbelievable. They went so fast that the agent who was driving was saying a mantra to himself, oh my God, I hope I don't run over Timmy. Timmy was, of course, Tim McCarthy who took the bullets. Who took the bullets and fell. Chaos on that day, extraordinary, how much worse it could have been. But everybody made great decisions. The fact that Hinckley was able to be 11 feet from the president, that was a failure. That's what they did wrong, but what they did right, so overshadowed what they did wrong. So I wanna come back to Reagan in a second. I thought the Reagan and Kennedy contrast was interesting. I wanna go back to Nixon because to me, the really interesting takeaway from your writing about Nixon and the service was the degree to which Nixon politicized or attempted to politicize the service. By my count, the big grievous offenses or attempted offenses were, first of all, he wanted to use the secret service to entrap Ted Kennedy because he feared Kennedy as a political threat, either in the 72 election or he wanted to even disable him potentially for 76. Nixon's relying on the service to take on a number of expenses that were not really legitimately renovation expenses at Nixon's private properties. And then also Nixon's attempt to use secret service members to remove protesters, to basically disable the ability of Americans to protest peacefully, if not loudly, against their government. I mean, it reminded me, Carol, of what happened during the Trump years. And it reminded me of the same. I mean, there were so many eerie parallels between Nixon and Trump just regarding the secret service. This idea of we're gonna, we're going to handle anti-war protesters and anti-Nixon protesters by sickening the secret service on them and using them kind of as a tool. President Nixon's view of the secret service was very much like President Trump's in that this is another tool of my power. Not they're protecting me, but these are, but more like these are my goons. And Donald Trump deployed them the same at Lafayette Square on June 1, and nobody can forget the President's wish, President Trump's wish, to look as the law and order president, the tough guy. Look tough, right? Yeah, look tough, don't look weak. And Nixon wanted to do the same. When he was running for reelection, he wanted to have these images of these sort of vicious savage protesters fighting with the secret service so that those could be the images in the news pages. And that could show the voters who was gonna keep them safe, President Nixon. Yeah, so come back to Reagan. Again, something I maybe knew, but your book reminded me is that the President Reagan, when he was shot, lost nearly half the blood in his body. I remember being in middle school when President Reagan was shot and hearing about it and knowing enough to know that it was a big deal. But at the same time, never thinking that he almost died. I mean, lost nearly half the blood in his body. It is a stunning, stunning thing and hats off to the George Washington University doctors and the surgeon that put him back together again. I mean, they dealt with a lot of challenges, but part of the reason, Evan, that you maybe weren't aware of it at the time is because the secret service in the White House were seriously keeping that under wraps. How close he came to death was very much a... Only something we learn later, right? Yes, so hidden. And the surgeons dug out a devastating bullet out of the side of his lung, which was hidden behind a rib, so it was really hard for them to find. Yeah. You mentioned how things changed over these different instances, with every moment, I mean, I'll use the example of Jonathan Wackrow, who's quoted a couple of times in the book, was a presidential detail agent who says every time the service is tested, it gets better, right? So the assumption is they go through JFK. Well, after JFK, now they're gonna check the security of buildings along the motorcade route to prevent sniper fire, and there are gonna be no more open-top convertibles. After the Wallace assassination attempt, we're gonna change policies regarding rope lines. After the Reagan assassination attempt, now we're gonna add magnometers and we're gonna have covered arrivals. All of this seems smart and normal. Like to a civilian, I'm thinking, of course, but then of course I'm thinking back to the capital insurrection, where after the capital insurrection, just a couple of months ago, Nancy Pelosi and the security detail in the house, the Capitol Police, we're gonna add metal detectors, right? And it's such a point of controversy, right? As if the answer to every question is subject verb liberty, as opposed to, these are the leaders of our country and we have to protect them. So as much as we see the security protocols evolve over time, it's not without controversy, right? And why? I mean, you know this better than anyone, Evan. The problem here is security mixed with politics, right? Nancy Pelosi has never really wanted and has really pretty much resisted a fence around the Capitol. Why? It looks terrible. The President Trump didn't like the new fence design that they were envisioning to try to prevent these jumper incidents that were so humiliating. He said it looked like a prison. People, Kennedy didn't want detail agents on the back of his car when they were riding in motorcades. Well, Clint Hill will tell you, they begged, begged to be on the back of that car. And if it had come- And had they been, it might have actually prevented Oswald from having a good shot at the President, right? 100%. I think that they would have had a fighting chance to prevent his death. And as Clint Hill has said to me and others, he would have taken that bullet. He would have gotten in between it and the President. Now we don't want that, but that is what they signed up for. And all of these security issues, when you mix them with politics and people's political impression, you don't get a pure security answer. Yeah. Well, it's always a tension between freedom and security, right? I mean, this is always gonna be the tension whether it's with the Secret Service or the Capitol fencing, right? You wanna protect everybody, but you also want, you wanna have the ability to be free. So I've just moved, I hit this point in the book where I was like, where did everything go wrong? The problems you identify had been a plague on the Secret Service for years. And again, we may not have known about them as much out here in the world, but there was a US news story that you referred to in 2002 that details this long history of bad behavior of all kinds by agents. And yet I can't help but note that your chapter on the Obama years is titled, The Wheels Come Off, as if somehow the wheels had been on previously. But it was really in the Obama years that we really see the problems up close, right? And they seem, if anything, to get worse. They absolutely got worse. So there are two things going on at the same time. One is that after Clinton's presidency, there is an effort, especially by President Clinton to keep agents away from him, right? And as they get further and further away from him, their ability to secure him reduces. And it's the advent of the TV president, right? You don't want the agents in the shot, keep them a little bit further away. We want a visage of a strong independent president, nobody protecting him, nobody needs to be there. So that starts a downward cycle in terms of the rigor of their security. There's also the misconduct is allowed and because of an arrogance and secrecy and lack of transparency in the culture of the Secret Service. If they can keep classified programs that are important to protect the president's secret, they seem to believe they can also keep their weaknesses and some of their humiliating episodes a secret. And both of those things come to a horrible head during President Obama's two administrations, just episode after episode of both kinds, security gaffes and unbelievable bad boy behavior. So I was chronicling as I'm reading, I'm writing down everything bad that happens during the Obama years. And at a certain point I was like, I just have to stop because the volume of it was too much. You have the extraordinary racist culture of the service come out, these horrible emails and these horrible racist jokes that are made. Remember that, of course, that President Obama is a special case in that he is the first black president ultimately. He received Secret Service protection. The earliest any candidate has received security in the history of the protective detail, right? That's right. You have the South America trip, the Cartagena trip that was the basis for your post story, which of course, because you own that subject Carol, you go into an excruciating detail in the book, the best kind of excruciating. And so you know every single thing, twist and turn that happened. You have the fence jumper who gets into the White House in 2014. I think his name is Ortega, is that right? That's right. This is a comedy of errors, except that it's not even a little bit funny. How like you referred to earlier with the Trump instance, how did this guy manage to escape being seen? You have the agents who drive drunk into the security barrier. And then for good measure, you have the leaking of Jason Chaffetz's failed secret service application. This is all within a period of a few years. And it's extraordinary to me that nothing really seems to improve during that period. The shocker is everybody in the Obama White House threw up their hands after the jumper and after another incident that followed like minutes after almost, which was an elevator guard who was allowed to get close to the president, with a weapon. And he actually had a weird history, didn't he? He had a history that would have suggested you don't want this person by conventional standards near the president. Anybody who's not absolutely clean should not have a weapon and be near the president. This person had been charged, although not convicted, but charged with some crimes that involved in use of a gun. It should have been a red flag. A red flag. Everybody should have been screened, bottom line, but after these two things happened, the Obama White House is like, okay, we're done. And they ask in pressure for the director's resignation, thinking that a new leader is gonna make things all the better. But when they bring back, you know, Father Joe, Joe Clancy, who used to be the head of President Obama's detail and who he feels really comfortable with, somebody of great rectitude, you know, a great coach, when they bring him back and they're all like taking a big sigh of relief, like things are gonna get better. But no, things do not get better. And nothing changes the status quo. And these two people, one of them the highest ranking member of the president's detail in charge of all of security at the White House, leaves a retirement party, drunk as a skunk, and comes back onto the White House compound with another inebriated person. They drive their government car onto the White House complex so they can collect another car over a suspicious package investigation. You know, this is not the behavior of people who are on their game at all times. Or a functional entity like this. I mean, that's the thing. You don't hear these stories and think, well, this place seems to be working out okay. I mean, I didn't even mention the bullets that pierce the residents of the White House. And Mrs. Obama goes bananas over this, right? Yes, if you're the first lady and you find out from the White House usher five days after the fact that the house that your children were in was shot at while you were away, it's not a good way to learn the information if you're a mom, much less the first lady. It's extraordinary. So we get into the Trump years and what are the big takeaways from the relationship between Trump and the secret? First of all, the cost, man, there were a lot of costs associated with the Trump administration that we either found out at the time in many cases, thanks to the reporting of your colleagues at the post, or we're finding out now, we're far in excess of what we knew and far in excess of what by normal standards they should have been. A whole lot of people were protected in the Trump years by the service, right? Significantly more than had been protected in the normal administration. Yes, in fact, it was breaking the bank. I mean, there were 42 people, including the president at one point, the head then of the Department of Homeland Security, John Kelly, who ended up being the chief of staff, tries to get some people to give up their details because they're not under any kind of security threat. He asked Steve Mnuchin, we don't have enough money to protect the president, can we have your detail? Steve Mnuchin goes bananas, wants to keep his detail. Others give them up, Kellyanne Conway gave up her detail because she cared, she wasn't thrilled about it, but she gave it up because it was the right thing to do. At a certain point, you gotta make choices. You mentioned the president wanting aesthetic changes, the defense and all that. He wanted to remove those, what are those, movable posts that sort of up and down. Yeah, yeah, the underground security gates that rise and fall. Rise and fall because he didn't like the fact that when you ran over them, they made kind of an unpleasant noise or it was a little jarring. I mean, to me, the thing that I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about because the president was so concerned about the look of the people around him for four years was his concern that there were overweight people on the security detail. I want these fat guys off my detail is an actual quote from President Trump. And he said it because he was concerned that they wouldn't be in the shape to protect him. So there was a physical aspect to it, but you can't help but think that the president who was like the casting director for his administration in chief, is thinking people who don't look the image that I want them to look back to what you said at the beginning of this conversation about the Hollywood image of the service, they were banished from his detail. You know, you've drawn such a beautiful through line for something that worries me about the service and part of the reason I wrote the book. President Trump takes over at a time when the service is recovering and trying to rebuild, trying to rebuild, right? They've gone through a horrific eight years, episode after episode after episode. But what does Donald Trump care about using them as a tool, optics over reality? He doesn't care about governing. He hasn't paid any attention to their financial straits, the short change nature. Instead, his travel bleeds them dry. $30 million is necessary in spring of 2017. He's only been president for a few weeks. They make it, the secret service makes an emergency request because they know they won't be able to keep up with even the basic bare minimum because president's going to Mar-a-Lago every other weekend to golf and travel. That is very unusual. It's not unusual for presidents to travel. It's unusual for them to have leisure travel that puts money in the pocket of their own company, taxpayer money. And there was quite a bit of concern about the Obama expenses associated with security, but in the very first few months of the Trump years, it seemed like Trump was going to far exceed what the worst, and as you point out, some of that money had to actually go to Trump-owned businesses. So it's our money to protect the president higher than we would normally expect to have to pay and ultimately ends up in the pockets of Trump associates. Yes, and so back to your great through line. Donald Trump arrives, the service needs help. It gets less and less help. It's more short changed, more blood dry, and the person in charge is focusing on the optics about whether or not they're fat or not. Although many agents have told me they think that the president misunderstood who he was talking about, that those were other people who had desks jobs, but whatever, the optics are more important. And the problem is then the service gets to, the service leadership gets to take a pass and not look harder at their bigger problems deeper within. You know, I think about the Obama and the Trump years related, separate, but related. You know, the fact that you had the first black president and the nature of the threats to the first black president and his family on the one hand, on the other hand, the challenge of the kinds of rallies and the kinds of rally goers in the Trump years. I mean, to me, those present real serious challenges, even for a secret service at its best, let alone a secret service that is short staffed and under budget. So true. Director Clancy, who was still director while, forgive me while Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, gave an interview in which he said that it was the most chaotic campaign he'd ever seen in his life. And he was more careful in his language than others, but agents told me they had dubbed president Trump the chaos candidate because he was inciting violence at his own rallies. When protesters who were anti-Trump arrived, he would encourage his rally goers to physically attack them, saying that he would pay their legal bills. Pay their legal bills, we remember that, right? If you get in trouble, I'll pay your bills. So, I mean, there's a horrible scene where a woman from the university in Louisville is in a Kentucky convention center where the president is speaking. She has come basically to protest his anti-Muslim sort of rhetoric and she is pushed around like a rag doll. She is black. She is wearing a backpack. She has a phone and she is filming what's happening to her. And watching it from up above is horrifying because as men spit on her, call her names, racial epithets and almost push her to the ground. But they did so at Donald Trump's urging. Another way I want to ask you this question is the current political environment has to, from the services perspective, present more of a threat, the toxicity of it, the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories that you would have once dismissed as ridiculous and not even worth paying attention to. I mean, the kid who shot up the White House during the Obama administration, you was inspired by an Alex Jones movie, right? I mean, what must it be like today for the service having to deal with everything else now suddenly having to deal with these conspiracy theory fueled attacks or conspiracy theory inspired rallies that themselves then create more problems from a protective standpoint. Well, such a wise set of worries because look at what happened January 6th. Nobody imagined it. Nobody imagined it, but nobody really could have handled it other than several phalanxes of National Guard. We can't pretend that a slightly larger Capitol Police force could have handled that. Just a stunning display of the state in which our country is really nearly nearly civil war proportions. Right, and as you point out, there were a number of secret service agents who post insurrection, we learned sympathized or at least empathized with the one six rioters, which gets back to this question of whether the secret service can ever be properly apolitical, right? You're gonna have individuals who are gonna have political points of view. The president's gonna choose or not choose to unlock that part of it, but they themselves may have political points of view and that complicates matters further. You know, a law enforcement agency in America is almost always going to trend conservative, but I was just gobsmacked to have sources and agents send me the screenshots of their colleagues who are on the presidential detail, you know, cheering for the patriots who had stormed the Capitol to stop the stolen election. If you have the most elite agency in protection in the world, allegedly, and some members are stoking the belief that Biden is not a legitimate president, how safe is the democracy? How safe is President Biden? Right, and of course, you don't write about Biden very much in this book. It's, you know, kind of the, there's some mention of the new president. Do you have any sense of what it's been like? Sort of if there's a paperback version of this book, which there will be theoretically the new material will be about the first period of the Biden administration and whether he was able to reset everything or whether it was more of the same. What is your, what's your sense? I have heard that a lot of senior former agents that were close to former Vice President Biden are trying to spread the word partially through my book, pointing to it, but also their own experience is to say, it's time, it's time to fix it. Let's not wait for a disaster. Are we not, are we gonna pay attention now or are we just gonna wait until something horrible happens? Right, which of course, if we get, and go back to the beginning of our conversation, it took three assassinations before the Secret Service really stepped up and stepped in. We hope that it's not gonna take another one before these problems get fixed. I really hope so. Carol, I love this book and it is so great to talk to you. And, you know, I feel like I really have learned an enormous amount, not only reading the book, but spending this time with you. Thank you so much for making time for me. I really love talking about it with you, Evan. Thank you. Thank you, Carol and Evan, that was really enlightening. 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