Zero fail, p.51
Zero Fail, page 51
White had been proud and pleased to have won the job he worked so many years for, and now had the title of special agent in charge of the president’s detail. But for this veteran of presidential protection, it had come a little late.
Agents who work the president like to say that every year on “the show,” the president’s detail, is equal to four in normal human years. Stress ran high. White had joined Senator Obama’s campaign detail as one of the first three supervisors in May 2007, then went straight to President Obama’s detail and spent another eight years there. A favorite among Obama aides from the early campaign days, White had resisted leaving in hopes of becoming the special agent in charge. With President Trump’s election, he was now the top dog. But White had spent nine years on a job that agents were supposed to leave in four. He was beat. Beat enough that he told friends he wanted out.
Now, after learning about the two family detail agents’ silly hijinks, White prepared to have another awkward conversation with a boss he had known only about three months. On Monday morning, White found Sean Spicer outside his office and asked for some time alone with the president to brief him on a security personnel matter. The detail had just whisked Trump into a secure location inside his own home on Friday night after the jumper on the East Grounds. Now White had some more embarrassing news to tell Trump. He planned to share the worst part, then quickly pivot to explain what the Service had done to fix it.
Spicer said there wasn’t a lot of free time in Trump’s schedule.
“It’s important, Sean,” White persisted.
“Okay, I’ll get you ten minutes,” Spicer said.
In the Oval Office, White told it straight: Two idiots assigned to help protect Trump’s extended family had been caught taking selfies with Trump’s sleeping grandson. He made clear that there were consequences for the agents. They had been questioned by the agency’s internal investigations unit and were being reassigned immediately. The Trump family would not see these two again.
Trump sat in his chair behind the desk, slack-jawed. He asked White to rewind to the beginning.
“Now tell me that one more time. What happened, again?”
White obliged.
Trump asked a question to be sure he understood. These guys weren’t pervs, right?
No, White assured him. They were just being idiots.
Trump shook his head in disbelief. Then he stared back at White, squinting. “What the fuck is wrong with you guys?” he said.
* * *
—
WHILE TRUMP AND his son were furious with knuckleheaded agents’ behavior with a family member, two other Trump family members were getting inappropriately—and perhaps dangerously—close to their detail agents.
At the same time as the selfie incident, a different kind of trouble was brewing in the household of Donald Trump, Jr. The president’s son was spending more time away from home in late 2017, and his wife, Vanessa, was growing frustrated by the overwhelming logistical details she had to track and provide to the Secret Service agents who were assigned to watch her five young children. Donald Trump, Jr., had asked in September 2017 to give up his Secret Service protection, complaining he didn’t like the hassle of it. Friends said he wanted more freedom, fewer watchful eyes. In March 2018, Vanessa filed for an uncontested divorce and would also opt to formally waive protection for herself. Secret Service agents reported that Vanessa Trump had started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family. The agent didn’t face any repercussions, however. At that point, neither he nor the agency were her official guardians.
Meanwhile, Tiffany Trump, the daughter whom the president rarely mentioned as part of his family, had broken up with her boyfriend from college. In the aftermath, she began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail. Service leadership became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark, and handsome agent. It was prohibited for agents to have close personal relationships with the people they protected, as it could impair their objectivity and jeopardize the safety of their charge. He and she insisted that nothing untoward was happening, and he noted that being alone with Tiffany was required for his assignment. The concern was resolved when the agent later relocated to a field office in 2019.
It wasn’t clear whether the president knew what was being said about Tiffany or Vanessa and Secret Service agents, but he sometimes acted as if he were the head of personnel decisions at the Service. Trump had twice complained to try to get the head of Melania’s detail, Mindy O’Donnell, removed from her supervisory job. Like some fellow agents, Trump was bothered by the chunky heels she wore on the job.
“She’s too short,” Trump told advisers. “How do you run in heels?”
In the end, Mindy O’Donnell’s days on the First Lady’s detail were numbered for a reason other than the president’s negative reaction to her height. She moved off the detail and took a new assignment in 2018 amid a personal soap opera. As she and her husband, a senior and well-respected supervisor, separated, allegations surfaced that she was having a romantic relationship with another agent on the family detail. The Service quickly replaced her without fanfare.
Trump was pleased to see Mindy O’Donnell gone. But he remained obsessed with getting overweight agents removed from their posts when he saw them at the White House or working near him on presidential events. “I want these fat guys off my detail,” Trump told advisers, who felt the president might be confusing officers with agents. “How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”
CHAPTER 27
TAKING A HIT FOR TRUMP
Early on the morning of Saturday, April 8, 2017, a line of more than two dozen souped-up golf carts were parked under a grove of trees on the lush grounds of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. The carts had arrived in trailers driven up Interstate 95 from Miami—as a temporary necessity for the Christmas holidays when Trump decamped to his nearby Mar-a-Lago club to plan his new administration. But now they were a permanent fixture on the property. Donald Trump didn’t walk his courses, but rather rode in a golf cart; Secret Service agents needed to do the same.
The carts had a few special features, to suit their unique mission. Most were new, unlike the club’s carts kept in the nearby cart-barn and rented by members. These vehicles had more horsepower, so the agents driving them could outrun a man if need be. Many had large storage cabinets on the back, where agents on the elite Counter Assault Team could store their high-powered rifles and other emergency gear.
That Saturday at 9 a.m., the president’s motorcade sped out of Mar-a-Lago, where he had been staying for the last two nights, and about five minutes later the cars pulled, one by one, up the palm-tree-lined drive. The detail leader followed the president into the club’s entrance, then into the dining room for a quick breakfast before a round of golf. It was a perfect day, with temperatures in the low seventies and passing clouds. This was Trump’s twelfth visit to this course in his first three months as president. For the past several weeks, White House press secretary Sean Spicer had been fielding persistent queries from the White House reporters about the frequent golf outings, and about Trump’s seeming lack of focus on these critical early days of his presidency—or the bill to American taxpayers. The press corps bore down on Spicer, reminding him of Trump’s repeated accusations on the campaign trail that Obama had wasted the public’s time and money golfing, and Trump’s promise that he would be “too busy working for you” to do likewise. But by April 8, only two and a half months into his presidency, Trump was on pace to hit his own golf courses ten times more often than Obama had golfed. Due largely to Trump’s frequent jet-setting to his own resorts, the Trump family was on track to bill the taxpayer twelve times more for their travel than the Obama family had.
That morning, Trump and his Service protectors had deployed a relatively new tactic to deflect the nagging questions. They ditched the traveling press pool at a nearby library, where reporters had to sit in a conference room for hours and White House aides declined to say exactly what Trump was doing at his golf course. A White House spokesman said Trump was going to his club for meetings and to make calls that weekend. But he was of course golfing, in his trademark white golf shirt, black pants, and red “Make America Great Again” cap.
When he finished the round sometime after noon, Trump returned to the clubhouse for lunch. Club members applauded as he entered, and Trump smiled, then waved a warm hello to a friend he had asked to be the U.S. ambassador to Austria, Patrick Park. When Park and his party later got up to leave, one guest asked Trump if he’d be back to golf soon.
“Yes. I’ll be here for Easter,” Trump said. Someone mentioned that that was the following weekend. “Is Easter next week?” he asked. “Well, then, I guess I’ll be back next week.”
At Secret Service headquarters, the travel bills in his first few weeks were causing significant discomfort: The agency was going to burn through their $74 million annual travel budget for protective duties far too quickly. Trump’s preference for visiting his own faraway properties wasn’t abating. Fearful of how they would cope, the Secret Service had asked the White House budget office in March for an emergency injection of another $33 million. An internal document explained that the increase was necessary because senior officials’ travel was “extremely variable, difficult to predict and to plan for in advance as many protectees’ travel plans are unknown with limited time to prepare.” The Service budget request didn’t mention that the Service had never made this claim before the forty-fifth president’s arrival—nor that Trump was the person giving them limited time to prepare.
Still, the institution was genetically programmed to find a way to say yes to the president. Working agents didn’t see these trips as a choice, and didn’t trouble themselves with how much their bosses and the taxpayers were paying for the president’s travel habits. Compared to bills the Secret Service had shouldered over the years to protect presidents, renting golf carts for about $2,000 a visit didn’t seem so high. The Service had just paid $64,000 to a contractor to test and service Trump Tower’s elevators. Both had to be done. Agents were pleased to have found a work-around to protect the president’s life as he played his umpteenth round of golf.
Indeed, the golf cart rental was a comparatively small cost to add to the $3.2 million it cost the U.S. military, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service each time Trump decided to visit Mar-a-Lago and play a few holes. But no matter the Secret Service’s desire to deliver for the boss, the costs for these trips were rapidly adding up. For Trump’s critics, the golf cart bills would soon come to symbolize the pain the president was causing his own Secret Service.
In mid-April, reporters sniffed out a contract showing the Service had paid $35,000 to rent carts for Trump’s South Florida clubs for the first three months of Trump’s presidency. A Palm Beach Post columnist, Frank Cerabino, joined a flurry of pundits wagging a finger. “If this pace keeps up, it would cost more than a half million dollars for Florida golf cart rentals during his first administration,” he wrote in an opinion column. “There’s something unseemly about the Secret Service going to Trump’s private golf courses to protect him while having to provide their own golf carts…The real story here could just be that the Secret Service is an easy mark. After all, the protection service is also paying for the maintenance on the elevator at the privately owned Trump Tower in New York. Who knows what’s next? We may see agents replacing cracked barrel tile on the roof of Mar-a-Lago in the name of national security.”
The cart rentals cast the president as a politician on an endless holiday—on the public’s dime. Yet the Service’s biggest physical and financial drain was paying to support all the agents and officers it needed on each trip—at least seventy for even a bare-bones visit. The Service had to pay for hotels, food, transportation, and overtime for the entire team. On top of the protective and counter assault teams that shadowed the president, advance teams had to prepare a security plan for each visit. Secret Service officers had to set up checkpoints at the entrances to any clubs he visited, create vehicle screening zones with bomb-sniffing dogs for any guests, and man magnetometers at the building entrance. Trump’s weekend visits were becoming so routine, the agents and officers were logging tens of thousands of dollars in overtime each visit. The average weekend hop to Mar-a-Lago cost the Service about $400,000 to support its staff. If the president traveled every other weekend to golf, would the Service have enough left to pay for his packed schedule of travel around the country for official duties, and the even more expensive upcoming foreign trips to Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Paris, and Asia, much less for the travel of his family and the vice president?
President Obama’s critics had excoriated him for his golfing trips and Hawaii vacations, noting that this travel had cost taxpayers an estimated $97 million over his eight years in office. Trump’s travel, however, cost the government $13.6 million in just one month and quickly rose to $20 million in two months, according to a report by Congress’s watchdog. If the forty-fifth president continued at this rate, Trump alone was on target to cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $600 million for his travel in one term.
* * *
—
BUT THE AMOUNT of jet-setting wasn’t the only strain Trump had placed on the Secret Service. Another pressure had been building since just before the president’s inauguration and was again entirely due to the president’s choices, as well as his wife’s. In December, President-elect Trump notified the Secret Service that he wanted the agency to treat Trump Tower, the location of Trump’s luxury penthouse and corporate headquarters, as his personal residence. On top of that, Melania Trump shattered precedent by deciding she would choose to remain at Trump Tower with her son, Barron, for the next five months, saying she wished to let him finish out his current school year. (What the Secret Service didn’t know was that Melania Trump was also using the delay for leverage and personal financial gain; she wanted to renegotiate her prenuptial agreement with Trump to sweeten the settlement she’d receive in a divorce and secure a future role for her son in Trump’s company.) The law governing presidential protection allowed presidents to choose one personal residence—other than the White House—where the Secret Service would provide 24/7 protection, whether he was there or not. President Bush chose his ranch in Crawford, Texas; President Obama chose his family’s residence in Chicago.
But Trump’s choice created a security challenge unlike any the Secret Service had ever faced before: to protect a fifty-eight-floor skyscraper in America’s largest city, located on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, one of the busiest shopping districts in the world. Assessing and shielding the Trump family’s three-story penthouse apartment from attacks created a protection price tag unlike any other the Service had encountered. The Service realized in March 2017 this wasn’t going to be doable with the money they had for presidential protection, so they asked the White House budget office for a second emergency injection of $28.3 million to secure the property. The price tag dwarfed anything that had come before. Securing Obama’s personal home in Chicago had cost hundreds of thousands each year. The Service also had to reassign roughly a third of the agents in the New York field office to Trump Tower duty, pulling them away from their jobs investigating financial crimes. New York City had to indefinitely close down a side street on the south flank of the midtown tower. The level of protection provided for Trump Tower wasted money and manpower the Service could ill afford, and the burden of shielding a skyscraper where the president almost never stayed only compounded as the bills kept rolling in for the glitzy places Trump was frequently visiting instead.
In April, Democrats in Congress began demanding investigations of Trump’s travel costs and the burden it placed on the Secret Service. The increasing media focus on the trips was starting to worry prominent Republicans. In a public town hall in northeast Iowa, Republican senator Joni Ernst faced several questions about the president’s frequent flyer status at Mar-a-Lago, including going there to host Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in February and Chinese president Xi Jinping just a few days before the town hall. Ernst was openly critical of the pattern, adding that she supported the president’s agenda but that he had “certain flaws” as a person. “I do wish that he would spend more time in Washington, D.C.,” Ernst said. “That’s what we have the White House for.”
Inside Secret Service headquarters, meanwhile, the acting director and chief financial officer worried about the president’s proposed budget for the agency for the new fiscal year. Though Trump’s travel was gutting the agency’s coffers, the president proposed raising the Service’s budget a paltry eight-tenths of one percent for the fiscal year starting in October. How would they stay in the black, with the president’s pattern of travel, with the overtime meter running so fast, even with the extra injection of $60 million for travel and Trump Tower?
To make matters worse, the Service was lacking a permanent director at the time, a person to lobby the president directly. Director Clancy, a longtime leader of President Obama’s detail, had announced a few weeks after the inauguration that he was leaving to give President Trump the chance to name his own director. Trump had a close and jovial relationship with agents on his detail, especially with the top supervisor who was about to become his special agent in charge, Tony Ornato. But there was no way any supervisory agents were going to second-guess the president on his choices. Kelly tried to recommend fewer trips, explaining to Trump that this travel was forcing the Service to cut back on other parts of its work, but Trump’s only response was “Just work it out, okay?” Kelly knew he needed a new director but felt unsure about Callahan and his current team after the Tran incident. Callahan would withdraw his name from consideration and then take a few months of medical leave that April to receive treatment for cancer. Kelly recommended a retired Marine Corps general whom he knew well and trusted, Randolph “Tex” Alles. But Trump had resisted, saying he wanted to hire someone he knew—and besides, Alles didn’t have “the look” Trump was hoping for. The president dithered. Finally, Kelly put his foot down, saying he was the secretary for homeland security, for God’s sake, and he had to be the one to make this call. Begrudgingly, Trump officially named Alles to the job on April 25.
