WTF happened to the Secret Service?

The Secret Service has always been one of those national organizations like the FBI and the ATF and the DEA that people join because they want to serve in law enforcement at the highest level.  They are the rather austere looking tall men – lately including some women – in dark glasses and dark suits and white shirts who stand around protecting the president or vice president and members of their families when they appear in public.  They are the agents who jumped into action and protected President Reagan the day he was shot by John Hinkley, probably saving his life.

The requirements to become one of these special agents are strict.  You can’t have any visible tattoos or other body markings.  You must have nearly perfect vision that is correctable to 20/20 and perfect hearing.  You must be able to pass an extensive background check and qualify for a top-secret security clearance.  And you have to pass a very tough physical exam and physical abilities test.

I have always understood the Secret Service to be a kind of calling to which only the most driven and dedicated respond.  You’re signing up to be willing to take a bullet to save the life of the person you’re protecting, after all.  Self-sacrifice and dedication to duty are the hallmarks of a Secret Service agent.  I had friends when I was in high school in the Washington D.C. area whose fathers were Secret Service agents.  Many of our fathers were army or navy or air force officers, but Secret Service agents stood out because they went to work knowing they were risking their lives every day, while our fathers worked in the Pentagon or behind a desk at Fort Belvoir and were asked to risk their lives only when sent to war.  Secret Service agents were heroic and noble.  Everyone looked up to them.

Most Secret Service agents, and most military officers for that matter, are more conservative than liberal and always have been.  The jobs are often described as “self-selected,” and those who serve in them often come from families with parents or other relatives who are in the same service.  They are volunteers. That the military, the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA and ATF all attract people who are more conservative than not has always been a given.  But just as politics has been said to stop at the water’s edge, politics has been expected to stop when you put on a uniform or don the dark suit of a special agent.  In the military, you’re not defending Democrats or Republicans from enemies both foreign and domestic.  You’re defending Americans.  As a Secret Service agent, you’re not there to protect a Republican or a Democrat.  You’re there to protect the president and vice president and their families no matter their party. 

What has happened to that noble calling?  Why is it that we find ourselves reading stories that say the Secret Service has deleted text messages between agents, and between agents and their superiors, that were sent on January 5 and 6 of 2020?  When the House 1/6 Committee subpoenaed those messages last week, the Secret Service was able to provide only one message.

The Secret Service didn’t have the records they are required by law to keep and which they were told by multiple Congressional committees to preserve on January 16 and 25 of 2020 because on January 27, they began a wholesale changeover of Secret Service cell phones, and during that process, virtually all of the data they had been required to preserve was deleted.

At least that’s what the Secret Service told the 1/6 Committee.  It was all a kind of innocent mistake, they seem to be saying.

Or perhaps it was something else.  Perhaps it was the Secret Service for the first time in its history protecting a president, Donald Trump, from himself instead of from an unknown attacker.  Perhaps the Secret Service, from the agents serving on the White House detail right up to the Director of the Secret Service, decided that politics was more important than duty when it came to January 5 and 6.

If that is true, and as each day passes it is looking more and more like it is, then it’s telling us something even more extraordinary than the already extraordinary events that took place on those dates.

In other words, something truly awful must have happened and been recorded by the Secret Service agents who witnessed it for those agents and their superiors to feel called upon to protect the man who said and did the awful things from himself.  We know that things happened within the walls of the White House that were so awful that Donald Trump has felt it necessary to attempt to influence the testimony of junior White House officials and even a member of the Civil Servant White House staff.  What happened in the White House was bad enough that Trump has been willing to risk committing the crime of obstruction of justice to cover it up.

And now the Secret Service, from its leadership right down to the agents on duty on those dates, serving to protect both the president and the vice president, is doing the same thing.  They are risking committing a crime in order to protect a president from being found out as a common criminal.  They have destroyed evidence subpoenaed by the 1/6 Committee, evidence that they were instructed by at least four other Congressional committees to preserve before they even began their so-called “migration” of agents’ phones from old ones to new ones.

What we are seeing here is something just as bad if not worse than the attempted coup that overran the Capitol on January 6.  It’s a coup of another, more insidious kind – a coup wherein right-wing politics has overcome the dedication to duty that has long been required of those who took oaths to protect and defend not just the men and women they are assigned to protect, but the Constitution of the United States.

Every time one of these Republicans who have appeared before the 1/6 Committee and given damaging testimony about Donald Trump has been asked if they would vote for him if he ran in 2024, they’ve said yes.  These are people in some cases whose lives have been ruined by Donald Trump, people who have experienced death threats to themselves and their families, and the answer they have given is dangerous in the way the right-wing takeover of the Secret Service is dangerous.  They have all said some version of the same thing, that they would vote for Trump again because the Democrats are destroying America in some unfocused and apparently unmentionable way.

So the Secret Service has apparently decided that in order to save America from the terrible Democrats they have found it necessary to save Donald Trump from himself by destroying the evidence they know exists of his criminal behavior on January 5 and 6.  Not his criminal behavior before those dates, and there is evidence of plenty of that already on the record, like the Raffensberger phone call and the conspiracy with Eastman and others to invent fake electors and all the rest of it.

What could have happened that was so terrible on January 5 and 6 in the White House that the Secret Service would find it necessary to destroy its own reputation for fairness and bravery and service to the nation? 

Maybe by the end of the 1/6 Committee’s hearings we will find out.  In the meantime, because of their outrageous destruction of evidence in the deleting of texts of January 5 and 6, 2020, the Secret Service has done us the favor of letting us know the evidence they destroyed is really, really bad.