Zero fail, p.49
Zero Fail, page 49
This general trajectory of Trump’s campaign events—the candidate drawing crowds full of vitriol, and righteous supporters both armed and ready to rumble with mocking dissenters—was deeply concerning. Detail agents asked that barriers used to hold back spectators be pushed an additional six to ten feet back from the stage, to give them more time to surround and shield the candidate if someone rushed them. People were crashing through the barriers more frequently, something agents had rarely seen before. Director Clancy was worried too, calling the threat level for the 2016 candidates “elevated” compared to years past, with protesters “threatening harm to the candidates, being disruptive, and some just wanting to be heard.” In July, the Secret Service called in its largest phalanx of reinforcements in history, a total of four thousand agents from the Secret Service and brother agencies, for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Despite the chaos, members of the Secret Service were privately cheering Trump’s political message about cracking down on criminals and immigrants. Many in the agency leaned conservative politically anyway because of their law enforcement roots, and often voted Republican. A good number had been quietly rooting against Hillary Clinton, sharing jokes about what a nightmare she would be in the Oval Office. As a First Lady and secretary of state, she had earned such a bad reputation in the agency that it was hard to separate the reality from the lore. Some agents who had been on her protective details over the years swore she had refused to speak to them, scolded them for poor route selection when driving her to an event, and called the director to lodge complaints about them. Trump, by contrast, was normally playing bro to the agents, joshing with them about the “crazies” who showed up to boo and hiss at his rallies.
There were notable exceptions in the agency, of course. One seasoned agent working frequently on Trump campaign events found Trump’s behavior intolerable to watch up close; the man pleaded for a reassignment, never giving the real reason, so he could escape Trump’s orbit. One of the Service’s highest-ranking women supervisors, Kerry O’Grady, was aghast at Trump’s behavior on his frequent visits to the Rocky Mountain states she oversaw as the agent in charge of the Denver field office. It wasn’t his politics that made her skin crawl; it was his lack of a moral code. He cheered fascist slogans, ridiculed the weak, and incited violence at his rallies. At a rally in Greeley, Colorado, O’Grady was shocked to realize that a national reporter had hired a retired agent for protection because Trump had incited attacks against him and the press in general. After The Washington Post released a video recording on October 7 in which Trump bragged that he could grab women “by the pussy” without asking, O’Grady couldn’t contain her building feelings. She had taken her protection duties seriously, making aggressive moves to safeguard Trump’s life such as adding reinforcements at rallies and once recommending pulling him offstage at an event where massive crowds were throwing rocks and surrounding the building. But Trump represented everything she’d spent a lifetime fighting in law enforcement. His behavior branded him a predator and a bully—the kind of danger she was normally shielding the public from. That night, she wrote a private Facebook post that many agents would later call a dereliction of duty but which she considered the rational response to a dangerous candidate like none the Service had protected before.
O’Grady, a twenty-three-year veteran of the agency, wrote that she realized publicly endorsing Clinton could be a violation of the law that prohibited government servants from taking partisan positions. “But this world has changed and I have changed,” O’Grady wrote. “And I would take jail time over a bullet or an endorsement for what I believe to be disaster to this country and the strong and amazing women and minorities who reside here. Hatch Act be damned. I am with Her.”
Some male agents in Denver noticed and stored images of her post. Within days, copies were reported anonymously to the complaint hotline of the inspector general’s office. The inspector general’s team concluded that this was a relatively minor personnel matter and routed it to the Service to handle. Near the end of November, Wofford, O’Grady’s direct supervisor, called her. Wofford said her boss, Assistant Director Ken Jenkins, had instructed her to contact O’Grady about her ill-advised post. O’Grady said she knew she had crossed a line and explained she had already taken down the post. She asked Wofford if she was in trouble. Wofford told her to consider the call a verbal counseling, a formal discipline used for minor infractions, but didn’t spell out which policy O’Grady had violated. By that time, Trump was the President-elect, and the last thing the Service wanted was to poke the man who would be their new boss. In what had become a Secret Service pattern, the agency kept chugging along, glad to keep a potential controversy under the radar.
But O’Grady had trouble stifling her concerns about Trump. The day after his inauguration, the day of the Women’s March, she updated her profile picture to add an image of Princess Leia. The caption underneath read: A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance. Within hours, someone leaked screenshots of her earlier “bullet” post to a D.C.-based reporter, who called O’Grady for comment. O’Grady, who was authorized to speak to the press, explained off the record that Trump’s “pussy” comment seemed to mock the crime of sexual assault and had triggered a flood of memories of an incident in which a male college student tried to rape her in her freshman year. O’Grady alerted headquarters to the reporter’s call; her new boss said he’d check into it with Jenkins and called back to say the issue of her Facebook post had been “put to bed” and was no longer an issue. Then the reporter published the full story on January 24. In a matter of hours, the Secret Service turned on O’Grady with urgency and ferocity.
Agents across the country, especially male supervisors, hit the roof. One retired agent who had worked with O’Grady and admired her work ethic called me, nearly spitting into the phone. “She has got to go,” he said. “She’s not some baby agent. She is a GS-15 supervisor. She’s the face of the Secret Service. And she’s not going to take a bullet?” O’Grady met with her staff to alert them to the story and answer questions. Headquarters summoned her to Washington to be debriefed, saying they were concerned about her safety.
But when O’Grady arrived at the D.C. airport, she was surprised to find that an agent she didn’t know was picking her up and taking her to the agency’s internal affairs unit for an investigation. She had to turn over her gun. While she waited to go into an interview room, Tony Ornato, the head of Trump’s detail and a colleague she knew well, emerged from that same room and glared at O’Grady. “Hey, Tony,” she said, but he walked away without responding.
The investigators asked her a barrage of questions. What kind of phone did she use to talk to the reporter, work or personal? Had she made the call on government time? Supervisors claimed she’d lost the confidence of her staff.
On her first day in Washington, the board of the retired agents’ association, a networking group for alumni, voted to kick O’Grady out of their club. “She engaged in conduct deemed by a majority of the Board to be detrimental to the Association of the U.S. Secret Service,” the association wrote to members. Director Clancy issued an unusual and confusing notice to all staff later that night announcing that the Secret Service was investigating the agent at the center of a news story on a “bullet” remark. It was odd to describe one employee’s personnel matter, but Clancy reported the Service had earlier looked into that Facebook post in November and “action was taken.” He added that the Service would now investigate—again. O’Grady told friends she feared the agency, amid the publicity, was searching for something, anything, even a technical violation, to manufacture a case against her.
Her instincts proved right. Over the next month, she was flown to headquarters three times for interrogations; her office, gym locker, and computer were searched; she was given a polygraph test and psychological evaluation, both of which she passed. In the end, the Service charged her with three violations, none of which had anything to do with the post she had already been disciplined for. She was cited for (1) breaking the Service’s policy barring staff from talking to reporters (though she was the designated public spokesperson for her district, the agency said she wasn’t supposed to talk to national reporters), (2) storing alcohol on government property by having a flask in her office (though supervisors in headquarters kept alcohol in their offices), and (3) obstructing the investigation by seeking to have colleagues remove alcohol from her office and other supervisors’ offices. They bucked her down two grades, from a GS-15 to a GS-13.
O’Grady would ultimately beat this downgrade, and the latent campaign against her. She believed Trump was pressuring the agency to fire her; she and her lawyer insisted to a judge they wanted the Service to turn over all communication between the White House and the Secret Service about her. The Service had long resisted any settlement talks, but they quickly settled the case after hearing this request. O’Grady retired.
O’Grady’s suggestion that she didn’t want to “take a bullet” was anathema to the Service’s ethos of protecting whoever was duly elected. But agents and alums outraged at her anti-Trump sentiments weren’t equally offended by agents who expressed racist views or personal and political disgust with Hillary Clinton. The fury at O’Grady was understandable in some ways. But something much deeper in the Service’s DNA was fueling the caustic reaction, in which they were protecting a conservative in their own image. No supervisors complained about field office agents who had “Make America Great Again” hats on their desks. Supervisors hadn’t raised the same harsh objections when friends on the job shared “Crooked Hillary” memes that depicted the former secretary of state with red eyes and a devil’s pointy ears, or swapped crude jokes about her inability to satisfy her husband. The Secret Service was still overwhelmingly an agency of cops who preferred long prison sentences for bad guys rather than sentencing reform, who, like Trump, tended to speak dismissively about women, minorities, and immigrants. A large number of the Service’s agents and officers, unlike so many other career civil servants in Washington, were pleased to see the man who spoke their language step onto the White House’s North Portico on Inauguration Day to enter his new home.
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THE SERVICE HAD given Trump the code name Mogul in honor of his success as a business owner and executive. But the real estate developer’s arrival actually exacerbated two key management problems the Secret Service had been suffering from through the last term of President Obama: an overworked staff and an overstretched budget. The new president decided he would move to Washington, but his wife, Melania, and son Barron would stay in New York until the end of the school year. In addition, Trump signaled in his first weeks in the job that, contrary to his promise to save taxpayer money on his travel and “rarely leave the White House,” he would be visiting his Mar-a-Lago resort on many weekends. On top of that, the Service had to increase the number of people they were protecting—to add eighteen members of Trump’s family, from his wife to his grandchildren. The president had two grown children who were active parts of his business empire and frequently traveled internationally for their work. Within weeks of his arrival, the Service sought a $60 million increase in its budget just to keep up with the new expenses.
The accumulating costs worried John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, under whose purview the Secret Service fell. The president’s budget office was busy working on Trump’s first budget proposal, the anticipated starting gun to signal the new administration’s priorities. Trump knew what his base of supporters wanted him to do: take a big knife to all of it. Mick Mulvaney, the budget office director who had been known as a fiscal conservative in Congress, was eager to oblige, and endorsed a 30 percent cut in both the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department. Everything would get chopped except the departments working to stop and prosecute illegal immigrants at the border. Kelly could tell the Service wasn’t going to get the large influx of cash it needed, so he started looking for ways to cut special projects and operating costs. One big-ticket item in the Service’s budget request was a $60 million project to replace the six-foot White House fence with a stronger, twelve-foot version. The Service labeled the new fence a security necessity, something they had been working to finalize ever since a fence jumper got inside the White House in 2014. Kelly asked his team to look at some cheaper options. At the same time, the secretary faced a roadblock in trying to pare back. Just as Donald Trump the developer had insisted on personally choosing the green marble for the bathroom floors when renovating the Plaza, the president had strong feelings about certain aesthetics on the White House grounds. Trump wanted the Service to redesign the fence. He didn’t like the tightly spaced black rails with the pointy spears on top.
“Too much like a prison,” Trump said.
The fence replacement project also called for strength testing and possible reinforcement of the complex’s six vehicular entry gates. The president, whose travel habits were causing this careful examination of potential cuts, proposed a massive multi-million-dollar change. He wanted to dig up and replace all the lowered gates, because he hated the bump he felt when his limo drove over them.
Budget officials and Kelly tried to push off the plan; digging up and replacing the enormous vehicle gates was considered so cost-prohibitive, they hoped to delay and delay until Trump got tired of asking.
Instead, Kelly turned to reviewing the large number of security details—forty-one in all. The Secret Service was stretched so thin protecting all these people that some Trump aides getting protection occasionally had to ride in their agents’ personal cars. Senior officials were told to give the Secret Service two hours’ notice if they needed a ride, because they couldn’t take a car out for the whole day. The Secret Service simply didn’t have enough working vehicles to go around. He looked for details he could cut, and started with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. There was no credible threat against Mnuchin’s life. He was getting the detail because of tradition; Treasury had been the first home of the Secret Service, and the Treasury secretary continued to enjoy a detail even after the agency was moved into the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. Kelly said it was time to rethink tradition. He was considering reducing or eliminating his own detail, and he suggested Mnuchin give up his. Mnuchin was aghast. He scurried to complain to Jared Kushner, and soon began urging that Trump and Kushner let him return the Secret Service to its rightful home in Treasury. “Mnuchin felt it was a God-given right,” said one national security official. “He pulled out all the stops. There weren’t even any known threats to him.”
Kelly blocked Mnuchin’s transfer idea, but he lost on the detail. Mnuchin kept it even as a female cabinet member, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, was getting a stream of death threats and had to temporarily hire her own private security. The decision left the Service scrambling to find enough bodies to staff details for forty-one people, pulling agents from other assignments and rotating them out of their field offices for two-week stints, all to shield and follow every waking move of this expanded group of presidential family members and senior advisers. It also forced the Service to pay the Trump organization more money. Mnuchin at the time was a favored cabinet secretary of Trump’s; he had moved into one of the most expensive suites in Trump’s International Hotel in Washington while his home was being renovated and lived there for six months. The Franklin Suite normally cost $8,300 a night, but Mnuchin negotiated a discount. Mnuchin’s choice of hotel generated a lot of income for Trump’s business. On top of Mnuchin’s bill, the Secret Service also had to rent a room next door to the secretary’s for six months, which meant taxpayers paid $33,000 more to Trump’s company.
Being stretched thin had led to humiliating security lapses in the Obama years, and it happened again in the early months of Trump’s first year in office. Over the course of one March weekend, Trump’s new security team would commit two major blunders, a mixture of embarrassing and dangerous. These back-to-back screw-ups, one of them largely kept secret, would test their relationship with the new Boss and raise doubts whether they were worthy of his trust and confidence. In the second week of March, Washington’s fickle spring weather teased the city’s residents with a balmy preview of summer. Temperatures rose into the high seventies, and downtown office workers flocked to outdoor cafés for lunch al fresco. But on the afternoon of Friday, March 10, the weather snapped back to bitter winter. Dark clouds rolled in, the wind picked up, and temperatures plummeted back to freezing. Secret Service officers working the afternoon and evening shifts on the White House grounds took refuge in their guard boxes and eagerly awaited their turn to rotate to a post inside the residence.
The rapid downturn in the weather mimicked the darkening mood inside President Trump’s White House. His domestic policy team and political advisers were reeling from several setbacks that Friday, his fiftieth day in office. Some top Republicans warned the White House that Senate conservatives were not likely going to embrace a GOP House bill to repeal Obamacare, one of the president’s top objectives. Legal challenges against Trump’s travel ban continued to mount. The Associated Press and The Washington Post broke the news that lawyers had warned the Trump transition team before and after the inauguration that Michael Flynn, the president’s pick for national security adviser, would need to register as a foreign agent working for foreign governments.
After a late afternoon meeting with his secretary of housing, the president retired for the day. He asked for a favorite comfort meal to be brought up for dinner from the White House chef: meatloaf. He stewed in front of a television set in the executive residence that evening, flipping between cable news shows carrying mostly unflattering headlines about the stalled state of his agenda.
