Secret Service

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares11 Views

    Secret Service Suspends Six Agents Over Trump Assassination Attempt

    by

    The announcement comes near the anniversary of the shooting at Donald J. Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa.The Secret Service said on Thursday that it was suspending six agents involved in securing the site of a campaign rally where a gunman tried to assassinate Donald J. Trump last summer.The suspensions range from 10 to 42 days, without pay, the agency said in a statement just days before the first anniversary of the shooting. It did not give a sense of timing for the suspensions or name the agents, citing privacy law. All six had been placed on restricted duty after the rally while the agency conducted an internal review.The Secret Service came under intense scrutiny after a 20-year-old gunman was able to fire several shots at Mr. Trump while he spoke onstage at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, 2024. A volunteer firefighter in the crowd that day, Corey Comperatore, was killed and two other attendees were injured. The gunman was killed by the Secret Service.It was the first assassination attempt since 1981 to wound a current or former president — a bullet grazed Mr. Trump’s ear. There were immediate demands for changes at the Secret Service, and the agency’s competency was called into question.Multiple inquiries into the failures, including from Congress, came to similar conclusions and led to dozens of recommendations to change systemic problems. In the midst of the scrutiny, there was a second attempt on Mr. Trump’s life. While Mr. Trump golfed in Florida in September, agents shot at a suspect who was hiding near the outer edge of the course.But the sense of urgency to address the issues at the Secret Service dissipated after Election Day. The lawmakers who demanded accountability and changes have said very little publicly about the agency since Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump accuses former FBI director of calling for his killing through coded picture

      by

      Donald Trump accused the former FBI director James Comey on Friday of calling for his assassination in a coded social media post written in seashells.Comey’s Instagram post – a photograph of seashells on a beach arranged to spell the numbers 8647, which he captioned “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” – was used by rightwing supporters of Trump to claim that it was a call to assassinate the US president. The Secret Service said it has launched an investigation.Comey has said it “never occurred to me” that the numbers represented a coded threat. The number 86 is common slang for stopping or getting rid of something, typically old equipment, or being ejected from an establishment such as a bar, and is often a synonym for “nix”. The number 47 could be understood to indicate Trump, the 47th president.The Secret Service, which is in charge of presidential security and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, interviewed Comey later on Friday as part of an “ongoing investigation”, DHS secretary Kristi Noem confirmed on social media.“He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant? That meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News from Abu Dhabi, where he is wrapping up a four-day Middle East trip.Trump claimed Comey “was hit so hard because people like me and they like what’s happening with our country”, adding: “And he’s calling for the assassination of the president.”Comey, who was fired by Trump in 2017 during an investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 election, removed the post hours after it began to draw attention from Trump administration officials and supporters.After taking down the post, Comey said he thought it was a political message but said it did not occur to him that it could have been associated with a call to violence.The exchanges are the latest in an ongoing war over inflamed political rhetoric. Two assassination attempts were made against the president last year, both from people without any clear partisan ideology.The number 86 has also been used by Republicans calling for the impeachment of Joe Biden: for example, T-shirts sold on Amazon read “8646”, indicating a call to impeach Biden (the 46th president).Overheated political rhetoric has long been a subject of controversy. Biden said last July it had been a mistake for him to say “time to put Trump in a bullseye”, days before Saturday’s assassination attempt on his election rival, while Trump has repeatedly used similar language, including suggesting that the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney might not be such a “warhawk” if she had rifles “shooting at her” to see how she felt.A spokesperson for the Secret Service confirmed the agency was “aware of the incident” and said it would “vigorously investigate” any potential threat, but did not offer further details.In a statement, Comey said: “I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”The post ignited a firestorm on the right.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Disgraced former FBI director James Comey just called for the assassination of POTUS Trump,” the homeland security director, Kristi Noem, wrote on X. “DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.”The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, said his agency would “provide all necessary support” as part of an investigation headed by the Secret Service.Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesperson for the presidential security agency, said on social media that the agency investigates anything that could be taken as a threat. “We are aware of the social media posts by the former FBI Director & we take rhetoric like this very seriously,” he added.Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, said she didn’t buy Comey’s explanation that the message carried no greater meaning. Gabbard said Comey had “just issued a call to action to murder the president of the United States”.“As a former FBI director and someone who spent most of his career prosecuting mobsters and gangsters, he knew exactly what he was doing and must be held accountable under the full force of the law,” Gabbard posted on X.Gabbard later told Fox News that Comey was “issuing a hit” on the president and that “the dangerousness of this cannot be underestimated.”The post comes as the former FBI director is about to publish FDR Drive, the third installment of a crime series about a fictional New York lawyer, Nora Carleton. Publisher’s Weekly outlined the plot as centering on a US attorney who tries to bring to justice “a far-right media personality with a popular podcast vilifying those he thinks are destroying America: intellectuals, immigrants, and people of color”. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      James Comey investigated over seashell photo claimed to be ‘threat’ against Trump

      by

      A photo of seashells posted on Instagram by the former FBI director James Comey is now being investigated by the US Secret Service, after the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said it constituted a “threat” against Donald Trump.On Thursday, Comey posted a photo of seashells forming the message “8647”, with a caption that read: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”Trump’s supporters have interpreted the message as an endorsement of violence against Trump – the 47th president. There is more debate around the use of 86, a slang term often used in restaurants to mean getting rid of or throwing something out, and which, according to Merriam-Webster, has been used more recently, albeit sparingly, to mean “to kill”.Comey later took down his post, saying in a statement that he was unaware of the seashells’ potential meaning and saying that he does not condone violence of any kind.“I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message,” Comey said in a statement. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”A spokesperson for the Secret Service confirmed the agency was “aware of the incident” and said it would “vigorously investigate” any potential threat, but did not offer further details.The post ignited a firestorm on the right, with Trump loyalists accusing the former FBI director of calling for the president’s assassination. Trump survived an attempt on his life at a campaign event in Pennsylvania last year.“Disgraced former FBI director James Comey just called for the assassination of POTUS Trump,” Noem wrote on X. “DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.”Comey and Trump have a deeply antagonistic relationship that stretches back to the early days of the first Trump administration when, according to Comey, Trump sought to secure a pledge of loyalty from the then FBI director, who refused.In a move that shocked Washington, Trump dismissed Comey, who was leading the criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the US election. Comey later wrote a memoir that recounted the episode, prompting Trump to declare him an “untruthful slime ball”.Comey has remained a Maga world bête noire, drawing rightwing ire whenever he steps into the political fray.Allies of the president were swift to condemn Comey on Thursday. “We are aware of the recent social media post by former FBI director James Comey, directed at President Trump,” Kash Patel, the FBI director, wrote on X, adding: “We, the FBI, will provide all necessary support.”Taylor Budowich, the White House deputy chief of staff, also responded by calling the photo “deeply concerning” and accused Comey of putting out “what can clearly be interpreted as ‘a hit’ on the sitting President of the United States”.Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett, a staunch Trump supporter, called for Comey to be jailed. “Arrest Comey,” he wrote on X. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      While Trump slashes jobs, his golf trips are costing taxpayers millions | Mohamad Bazzi

      by

      It’s no secret that Donald Trump loves to golf, especially at his own resorts. But Trump’s habit is costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars – even as he decries fraud and claims to slash waste in federal spending.Since he took office, Trump has fired tens of thousands of federal workers and tried to shut down agencies, part of his effort to unilaterally dismantle the government. He has also made seven trips to Florida and the golf courses he owns there.This weekend, Trump made his seventh visit to Florida and his sixth to his waterfront mansion and private club at Mar-a-Lago since his inauguration on 20 January. As Richard Luscombe noted in the Guardian last week, Trump’s frequent trips to his own properties not only cost taxpayer funds, but they benefit him directly – his businesses have charged the US government to house Secret Service agents and other White House staff. In other words, American taxpayers pay the Trump Organization for the right to protect Trump and his family.During Trump’s first term, his properties had a history of overcharging the Secret Service, by as much as 300% beyond the authorized government hotel rates, according to a report issued by Democrats in Congress last year. The report found that the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service as much as $1,815 a room per night to stay at the Trump International hotel in Washington DC – billing the US government significantly more than the hotel did for “rooms rented by the Qatari royal family and Chinese business interests”.It’s difficult to gauge exactly how much the Secret Service and other agencies spent at Trump properties, since various reports and audits focus on specific time periods instead of his full four years in office. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) estimated that the Secret Service paid nearly $2m to Trump-owned properties. Trump visited his properties an astounding 547 times during his first term, according to an analysis by Crew. That included 145 trips to Mar-a-Lago, 328 visits to Trump’s various golf courses and 33 visits to the Trump hotel in Washington, which his company sold in 2022 but is now negotiating to buy back.The cost to US taxpayers for Trump’s jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, which he calls his “winter White House”, far exceeds renting rooms for the president’s security entourage. A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which examined four trips that Trump took to his Palm Beach resort during his first term, put the total cost at $13.6m, or about $3.4m for each visit. That includes flying Air Force One, along with a separate cargo plane that carries the presidential motorcade, between Washington and the Palm Beach international airport. With seven trips so far into his current term, the US government has likely already spent more than $23m on Trump’s golf outings.And that estimate doesn’t capture the full costs to taxpayers. The GAO report does not account for additional federal funds to reimburse local law enforcement agencies for protecting Trump while he’s in Florida. The Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, has said that his department spends $240,000 a day to help the Secret Service protect Trump. Bradshaw recently asked county commissioners for $45m in additional funds to provide security for Trump’s visits through the rest of this year – and the county is asking Congress to reimburse those costs.Trump often conducted official business and brought other senior US officials on his golf-focused trips to his properties – and he is repeating this pattern early in his second term, when he has visited Mar-a-Lago nearly every weekend. Trump’s frequent trips to his golf clubs send the message to foreign leaders, business executives, lobbyists, Republicans in Congress, and others who want to curry favor with the Trump administration that his properties are open for business. Throughout his first term, Trump dodged accusations that he was violating the US constitution’s emoluments clause as his businesses accepted money from foreign governments or lobbyists connected to them. Trump’s businesses received $7.8m from at least 20 foreign governments during his first administration, according to a report issued by congressional Democrats last year, although a later analysis by Crew estimated that payments from foreign governments reached $13.6m.At Mar-a-Lago, business leaders were recently offered one-on-one meetings with Trump for $5m, while others paid $1m a seat for a small-group candlelight dinner with the president. Those funds seem to be going to Make America Great Again Inc, a Super Pac that spent more than $450m on Trump’s presidential campaign last year, and is now expected to raise funds for a presidential library that would be built after Trump leaves office.Previous US presidents enjoyed playing golf, including Barack Obama and George W Bush. In fact, as a private citizen, Trump mocked Obama dozens of times for leaving Washington to play golf during his presidency. In August 2016, during his first presidential campaign, Trump pledged he wouldn’t have much time to hit the greens. “I’m going to be working for you,” he told a rally in Virginia. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”Of course, Trump ended up spending far more of his first term as president playing golf than Obama had. And Trump’s problem is not how often he plays or how many weekends he takes off. Because Trump refuses to divest from ownership of his family business, his frequent golf outings go beyond questionable government spending – the president is enriching himself through payments that US agencies make to Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties.The president is exempt from conflict of interest laws that ban federal employees from taking actions that would directly benefit them. Since the 1970s, US presidents have voluntarily abided by these laws, and put their financial holdings in a blind trust. But Trump refused to divest from his extensive business interests during his first term, creating a web of conflicts and potential corruption. Today, Trump is more emboldened to ignore US laws and norms set by past presidents, partly thanks to last year’s supreme court ruling that concluded that Trump has “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts”.Since taking office in January, Trump and his allies, especially the billionaire Elon Musk, rushed to dismantle many of the safeguards put in place after the Watergate scandal to monitor government corruption and punish officials involved in ethics violations. Trump fired 17 inspectors general who served as watchdogs over federal agencies, and he gutted a unit at the justice department that was created in 1976, after Watergate, to prosecute public corruption cases.In his first term, Trump did not suffer any consequences for playing a lot of golf – and using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. Now, he seems determined to spend even more time shuttling back and forth to his golf courses at taxpayer expense, with a chunk of that money going to his businesses.

      Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Secret Service Shoots Armed Man Near the White House

      by

      President Trump was in Florida at the time of the episode, during which a man held a gun and a confrontation ensued, the agency said.The Secret Service shot a man near the White House early Sunday after an “armed confrontation” with law enforcement officers, the agency said in a statement.President Trump was not at the White House at the time. He is spending the weekend in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago Club.Earlier on Saturday, the local police shared information with the Secret Service about a suicidal person who may have been traveling to Washington from Indiana. Around midnight, members of the Secret Service encountered the person’s parked vehicle near 17th and F Streets, about a block from the White House. A man was outside of the vehicle, the agency said.As officers approached, they saw that the man had a gun and then a confrontation ensued, during which the Secret Service shot the man, the agency said.He was transported to a hospital, and his condition was unknown, the Secret Service said. There were no reported injuries to anyone with the Secret Service.The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington is investigating the shooting. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      US House hearing with Secret Service descends into screaming match

      by

      A hearing examining the Secret Service’s response to the assassination attempts against Donald Trump went off the rails on Thursday, when a screaming match broke out between the agency’s acting director, Ronald Rowe, and a Republican representative.The hearing, hosted by the House taskforce established shortly after the first assassination attempt against Trump in July, was meant to explore the steps that the Secret Service has taken to improve security measures of protectees, but Pat Fallon, a Republican of Texas, took the questioning of Rowe in a different direction.Fallon displayed an enlarged photo from a commemoration of the September 11 attacks in New York, which both Joe Biden and Trump attended earlier this year. Fallon accused Rowe, who was standing directly behind Biden and Kamala Harris in the photo, of taking the place of the special agent in charge that day and endangering the president’s security for the sake of a photo op.Rowe replied that the special agent in charge had been just out of the picture’s view, and he attacked Fallon for politicizing the September 11 attacks.“I actually responded to Ground Zero. I was there going through the ashes of the World Trade Center,” Rowe said.“I’m not asking you that,” Fallon interrupted, raising his voice. “Were you the special agent in charge?”Rowe yelled back: “I was there to show respect for a Secret Service member that died on 9/11.”Fallon suggested that Rowe, who is not expected to stay on as director once Trump takes office in January, had placed himself in better view to “audition” for the role in case Harris won the presidency.“Do not invoke 9/11 for political purposes,” Rowe told Fallon.“I’m not,” Fallon replied. He accused Rowe: “You endangered President Biden’s life, Vice-President Harris’s life, because you put those agents out of position.”Rowe denied that charge, telling Fallon: “You are out of line.”The chair of the committee, Republican Mike Kelly, repeatedly banged his gavel until the shouting subsisted. The heated exchange came as the Secret Service faces intense scrutiny over its security practices, which attracted widespread condemnation following the assassination attempt against Trump.The agency was pilloried for failing to ensure proper safety precautions at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman wounded the then presidential candidate and fatally shot an attendee named Corey Comperatore. Rowe’s predecessor, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned amid bipartisan criticism of her agency’s handling of security at the rally.At the hearing on Thursday, Rowe described the events surrounding the assassination attempt as an “abject failure”.“July 13 was a failure of the Secret Service to adequately secure the Butler Farm Shows site and protect president-elect Trump,” Rowe said. “That abject failure underscored critical gaps in Secret Service operations, and I recognize that we did not meet the expectations of the American public.”Rowe offered his condolences to Comperatore’s family and outlined a series of changes his agency had pursued since the July attack, including creating an aviation unit for drone surveillance of protection sites and streamlining communication with local authorities.“Let me be clear: there will be accountability, and that accountability is occurring,” Rowe told the taskforce. “It is essential that we recognize the gravity of our failure. I personally carry the weight of knowing that we almost lost a protectee and our failure cost a father and husband his life.”Since its formation in July, the taskforce has conducted 46 interviews and reviewed roughly 20,000 pages of documents, Kelly reported on Thursday. The taskforce is expected to release a final report on its findings in the coming days. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Panel Calls for Secret Service Overhaul in Report on Trump Shooting Attempt

      by

      The findings of a review of the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump in July are stark but familiar, underscoring the challenge of overhauling the agency.An independent panel reviewing the failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July called on the Secret Service to replace its leadership with people from the private sector and focus almost exclusively on its protective mission.The recommendations, part of a report released on Thursday and commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, outlined deficiencies that had already been identified in the months after the rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. Those include the failure of the Secret Service to secure a nearby building where a would-be assassin stationed on the rooftop fired eight shots toward Mr. Trump. That and other security lapses, members of the panel said, resulted from an absence of “critical thinking” among agents and supervisors.The panel was particularly struck by a “lack of ownership” conveyed by the agents it interviewed. Those involved in the security planning did not take responsibility in the lead-up to the event, nor did they own failures in the aftermath. And, the report added, they “have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions or opportunities for improvement.”The findings are stark — this is the first assessment to bluntly identify failures on the part of senior agents on Mr. Trump’s personal detail. Yet the conclusions are also familiar.A panel convened in 2014 after a man scaled the White House fence and entered the mansion made similar proposals. That the issues persist a decade later underscores the challenge of overhauling an agency with such an entrenched culture.“The service has become insular and stale,” Janet Napolitano, a member of the four-person panel, said in an interview. Ms. Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service’s parent agency, from 2009 to 2013, added, “It is time for the service to kind of break out and to reach out beyond its own agency to bring in talent that can really take a fresh look at what it is they do, and how they do it.” In the past century, the agency has had only one director not promoted from within.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      With Trump Facing Threats, Security and Politics Intersect as Never Before

      by

      He has been the target of two would-be assassins in a matter of months. The intelligence agencies have told him that Iran is still threatening to kill him, and Iranian hackers got into the email accounts of his aides.Those developments have left former President Donald J. Trump and his staff fearful, frustrated and dependent for the candidate’s safety on federal agencies at the heart of what Mr. Trump has long portrayed as a hostile “deep state.”But Mr. Trump and his team have also seized on his predicament for political ends, suggesting without evidence that the situation is at least partly the fault of the Biden-Harris administration for being unwilling to provide him the protection he needs to travel the country freely and meet voters on his terms.Mr. Trump approaches Election Day as simultaneously a subject of federal prosecution, a candidate who has threatened to fire much of the federal bureaucracy and a target dependent for information and protection on the same agencies likely to endure his retribution should he take office again.Interviews with people close to Mr. Trump and officials across the federal government reveal how deeply unnerved the Trump campaign has been by the assassination attempts and the Iranian threats and hacking — and how the American security apparatus has responded.At the same time, as Mr. Trump attacks and politicizes the agencies charged with both investigating the threats and protecting him, officials in the Biden White House and at the Secret Service worry that he is laying the groundwork to blame them should he lose the election.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Man arrested near Donald Trump’s California rally with loaded guns, police say

      by

      A man armed with guns and false press and VIP passes was apprehended by authorities at a campaign rally in California on Saturday being held by Donald Trump.The suspect, identified as Las Vegas resident Vem Miller, was intercepted by police at a checkpoint about a half-mile from an entrance to the rally in Coachella Valley, California, soon before it began, police said Sunday.Police said Miller was carrying a loaded shotgun, handgun and high-capacity magazine and is believed to be a member of a rightwing anti-government organization.Miller was booked for possessing a loaded firearm and a high capacity magazine – and was released after posting $5,000 bail, police records show.“The incident did not impact the safety of former president Trump or attendees of the event,” the Riverside county sheriff’s office said in a press release.The Secret Service put out a statement saying it was apprised of the arrest: “The incident did not impact protective operations. The Secret Service extends its gratitude to the deputies and local partners who assisted in safeguarding last night’s events.”The US Attorney’s Los Angeles office, in a statement on Sunday, also said Trump was not in danger, citing the US Secret Service. The statement added that while no federal arrest had been made, an investigation was ongoing.Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco said he believed at a press conference on Sunday that Miller was plotting to kill Trump, but acknowledged that was “speculation”. “What we do know is he showed up with multiple passports with different names, an unregistered vehicle with a fake license plate and loaded firearms,” the sheriff said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon.The suspect later told US media that he was a Trump supporter who bought the guns for his own safety and notified police at a checkpoint that they were in the trunk of his car. “These accusations are complete bullshit,” Miller said. “I’m an artist, I’m the last person that would cause any violence and harm to anybody.”He said he was surprised by his arrest, and had been detained for about eight hours.Miller holds a UCLA master’s degree, and in 2022 ran for Nevada state assembly. Bianco said Miller considers himself a so-called sovereign citizen, a group of people who do not believe they are subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.Bianco said Miller’s identity card was enough to raise suspicion with local rally security. “They were different enough to cause the deputies alarm,” he said, according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise.Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July, when a gunman’s bullet grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In September, another man was charged with trying to assassinate Trump after Secret Service agents discovered him hiding with a rifle near Trump’s Palm Beach golf course. He has since pleaded not guilty.Bianco said US Secret Service officials said his department went “above and beyond” in their efforts to protect Trump and others who attended the rally.Bianco also said the FBI is questioning another man after bomb-detecting dogs “repeatedly” identified him as possibly dangerous. That man was not allowed in the rally, Bianco said.Miller is scheduled to appear at the Indio Larson justice center on 2 January 2025, according to the Riverside county sheriff’s department inmate database.Reuters contributed reporting More