Three weeks ago, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe angrily pushed back on senators’ calls to immediately fire or discipline key agents who failed miserably to protect the life of President Trump. There were too many lapses in security to accidental in my mind. Several members of the Secret Service in the Pittsburgh Field Office has been placed on administrative leave. This has been confirmed by three sources from inside the Secret Service.
(Administrative leave occurs when a federal employee temporarily leaves their position and work duties – either because of a misconduct investigation or medical or mental health issue. These employees usually still receive pay and benefits, but those decisions are left to the discretion of agency leadership.)
While several members from the Pittsburgh office have been placed on leave, other members from different offices are still on the job causing many to believe that the Pittsburgh office is being made the scapegoat for everyone else. There is also another possible explanation, depending who authorized those leaves. If it came from the Washington office, a cover up could be in the offing. But, if the head of the Pittsburgh Field Office ordered it, he would not have the authority to suspend those who work for other people.
Dan Bongino, a popular conservative personality who spent 11 years in the Secret Service, has blasted his former agency’s “apocalyptic security failure” and called for a full house-cleaning of the upper leadership ranks in its Washington headquarters. Rowe, he said, is just as bad, if not worse than Cheatle because he was her hand-picked deputy and played a key role in her management decisions.
“My Secret Service colleagues I worked with, where nothing like this ever happened at our advances, are horrified at Ron Rowe, ashamed at what this agency has become,” he said in on his podcast the day after Rowe testified before the Senate. “… I’m not talking about a small cadre of them. I’m talking about a big group of former agents [who] are on fire about what happened here – they are horrified about what’s going on with this agency.”
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELOther current Secret Service agents, including one who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, pinned the failures at Butler directly on Rowe and other top leaders alleged ties because their decisions leading up to the July 13 rally set the rank-and-file agents up for failure.
A source in the Secret Service community told RealClearPolitics:
“Leadership’s mismanagement of technology and personnel are what led to the failures in Butler, but they are not the ones being held accountable.”
Mid-level Secret Service managers based in D.C. routinely reduce the level of security assets as a way to cut costs. There’s even greater pressure to reject asset requests during presidential campaign years when agency resources are especially stretched thin because there are multiple candidates to protect.
Because of the heightened Iranian threat against Trump, those decision wouldn’t just be made by mid-level Secret Service managers but likely would involve top agency officials too, the sources argued. In the case of the Butler rally, it was the first time agency leaders approved counter snipers for a Trump reelection event, but they still only allotted two counter sniper teams rather than the four teams requested, multiple sources have told RCP.
