Tag: Secret Service

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Crime Donald Trump

REPORT: Secret Service May Allow Trump Be Handcuffed If Indicted In New York Next Week 

It’s an image many have wished and prayed for since Donald Trump first descended an escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2016 and formally announced he would be running for president: The Donald in handcuffs.

That image could well become a reality next week, according to a report from Fox News which suggests the Secret Service may allow the ex-president to be placed in handcuffs and processed, complete with fingerprints and mug shots.

According to Mediaite, that news came from Fox anchor John Roberts.

“Now, when we are learning that the Manhattan DA’s office has asked for a meeting with law enforcement ahead of a potential Trump indictment, this is coming to Fox News from a source in the courts,” Roberts began, adding:

The meeting, which was requested yesterday and has not been set yet, is to discuss logistics for sometime next week, which would mean that they are anticipating an indictment next week. Same sources familiar with the planning said they will go over security preparations in and around the courthouse in lower Manhattan.

Secret Service will take the lead in what they will allow or will not allow, the source cautioned, mentioning, for instance, that the decision to handcuff the president, a former president or not, they will set the tone and will escort him into the courtroom.

Roberts continued:

The source believes that the former president will still have to be fingerprinted and processed like every other defendant. So this is a huge development. If Alvin Bragg has decided to go ahead with a felony indictment of the former president, this was a charge that the federal officials refused to prosecute on or even really pursue.

This was a misdemeanor in New York that Alvin Bragg has decided to elevate to a felony while at the same time downgrading other felonies to misdemeanors. So we’ll be watching this to see how it all unfold to get more information as it comes in.

Trump in handcuffs doing the perp walk. Even if he’s tried and found innocent, that image would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Fingers crossed. Maybe for once Fox will actually be right about something.

Categories
Congress GOP Joe Biden

Secret Service On The Verge Of Betraying Biden To House GOP Investigators: Report

The U.S. Secret Service is supposed to protect the president and members of his family, but it now appears the agency is about to sell President Joe Biden down the proverbial river by turning over information to Republican investigators in the House of Representatives about who has visited Biden at his home in Delaware since he took office.

Fox News reports that the Secret Service is making it clear they will indeed turn over any information to House investigators who want to hold hearings on classified documents found at the president’s home.

The U.S. Secret Service is prepared to offer names of individuals who visited President Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home if requested by Congress, Fox News has learned.

The White House continues to insist that there exists no formal visitor log for the personal residence where two troves of classified documents were found. 

While the White House has not kept a formal list, the Secret Service does collect information on guests with regular access to the home. 

This comes shortly after U.S. Secret Service chief of communications Anthony Guglielmi told reporters:

“The Secret Service does not maintain visitor logs at the private residences of protectees. While the Secret Service does generate law enforcement and criminal justice information records for various individuals who may come into contact with Secret Service protected sites, we are not able to comment further as this speaks to the means and methods of our protective operations.”

But a source has informed Fox that the Secret Service is ready to provide available background information on guests who have visited Biden’s home.

In late December, there were reports that Biden didn’t feel safe to speak freely around members of his Secret Service detail, with the Independent noting:

President Joe Biden was so disturbed by the Secret Service’s handling of text messages sought by the House January 6 select committee that he stopped speaking candidly in the presence of special agents assigned to his protection detail, a new book on the Biden White House has revealed.

In The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, author Chris Whipple writes that Mr Biden’s discomfort with the post-Trump era agency began early on in his presidency, when it became clear that “some of” the agents charged with protecting him from assassination were strong supporters of the man he defeated in the 2020 election, former president Donald Trump.

Indeed, the Secret Service was only too happy to “accidentally” delete thousands of text messages sent by agents on the day of the Capitol insurrection, but now they sound eager to provide House Republicans with whatever information they want.

Maybe it’s time for President Biden to demand that the Secret Service be completely overhauled and depoliticized. If it isn’t, no Democratic president will ever feel safe.

Categories
Joe Biden The Biden Administration

Expert Warns The Secret Service Is ‘Dangerously Contaminated’ And Poses A Threat To Biden

Jeffrey Robinson wrote a book on what it’s like to be a Secret Service agent, and he’s now warning that former president Donald Trump made sure to choose agents who were loyal to him, which has “contaminated” the agency and makes it a clear and present danger to current president Joe Biden.

Robinson, who authored Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service, warns in an article he penned for The Daily Beast:

“Wherever the Secret Service goes with the president, there’s constant radio traffic between those agents and the White House and the Secret Service Command Post, in real time. That’s all recorded. So, why would someone use texts or emails to avoid using radio traffic?

“The answer will likely be, because whoever sent them, or whoever received them, feared they were too incriminating to be seen by anyone else.”

As he interviewed the agents who would provide his personal protection, Trump made it clear he valued loyalty to him and only him as the single-most important criteria:

“According to sources inside the Secret Service, Trump was taking long looks at the agents around him to decide which ones were loyal to him. And because this is antithetical to the way the Secret Service must operate, he created the very dangerous situation where certain PPD agents were loyal to him, personally—just like bodyguards—while others did their job properly and remained loyal to the office of the presidency, just as Congress intended. Such fealty is not only against the spirit of the mission, it is emblematic of Trump’s contamination of the Secret Service and downright frightening.”

So where does this leave security for President Biden? Robinson concludes his article by noting:

“Now consider this. When presidents change, the PPD remains basically the same. Without any doubt, many agents on President Biden’s detail are determined to protect the president, regardless of who he is. But there are still those ‘bodyguards’ loyal to Trump—like [former Trump aide Tony] Ornato and his cronies—surrounding and protecting a man whom they believe stole the election and doesn’t otherwise deserve to be there.

“No matter what the emails and texts eventually reveal, the dangers of that should be obvious.”

Is President Biden safe? Or is the detail that is supposed to be sworn to protect him compromised?

Categories
Capitol Insurrection January 6

Deleted Secret Service Texts May Contain Information On Suspected DC Pipe Bomber

Though the story didn’t get nearly as much attention as what transpired on January 6, 2021, a day before the Capitol insurrection which left five people dead, the night before, on January 5, a pipe bomb was planted outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The same person who planted that bomb then proceeded to the Republican National Headquarters and placed one there, too, ABC News notes:

Wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, a pair of Air Max Speed Turf shoes with a yellow Nike logo, a backpack and gloves, the suspect walked through alleyways and equipped with what investigators say were two pipe bombs.

“They would have exploded. They could have exploded,” Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas Tuesday. “They are viable devices that could have gone off and exploded, causing a lot of serious injury or death.”

Oddly, the U.S. Secret Service missed the device when they did a routine sweep of the area in anticipation of Vice President Kamala Harris visiting the DNC headquarters. How did they manage to bungle that when their main job is protecting the president and vice president?

Now, of course, the Secret Service is alleging they cannot locate thousands of text messages sent by agents on both Jan. 5 and 6, which is causing plenty of speculation that the missing texts might just be related to the bomb investigation and/or possible suspects.

Were those pipe bombs missed because someone had targeted Harris? There’s all sorts of knowledgeable people asking that question today.

This entire thing stinks to high heaven and suggests that the Secret Service may be compromised. It’s time to put the agency under the microscope and investigate them until we get to the bottom of this.

Categories
Capitol Insurrection January 6

The J6 Committee Can Recover The Information In Those Deleted Secret Service Text Messages – Here’s How

Now that the U.S. Secret Service has told the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol that they are unable to retrieve any text messages sent by agents on Jan. 5 or 6, many are wondering if the House panel will ever be able to obtain any insight into what took place within the Trump inner circle on the day of the riots.

The Washington Post reported earlier this week:

The U.S. Secret Service has determined it has no new texts to provide Congress relevant to its Jan. 6 investigation, and that any other texts its agents exchanged around the time of the 2021 attack on the Capitol were purged, according to a senior official briefed on the matter.

Also, the National Archives on Tuesday sought more information on “the potential unauthorized deletion” of agency text messages. The U.S. government’s chief record-keeper asked the Secret Service to report back to the Archives within 30 days about the deletion of any records, including describing what was purged and the circumstances of how the documentation was lost.

But according to former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, even though the texts may have been deleted, there’s still a way to get the information contained in them.

Appearing on MSNBC Wednesday evening, Kirschner told host Joy Reid:

“One way you can try to recreate what those text messages said is to put everybody under subpoena. Place them under oath and ask them, for example, when you were in the basement of the Capitol in the loading dock trying to urge the vice president to get into the car and he said what Representative (Jamie) Raskin said were the six most chilling words, ‘I’m not getting in the car,’ what did you communicate to your fellow Secret Service agents? I mean, put them under oath and sweat them.”

Kirschner added that there’s already enough evidence for federal prosecutors to begin investigating what became of the Secret Service texts:

“You know, look, at this point, Joy, let’s call it what it is. They were asked to preserve texts and they deleted them. That, to me, feels like what we call adequate predication, a fancy term for enough evidence to open a criminal probe. If the Secret Service did nothing wrong, then they should welcome an FBI investigation into something that really looks nefarious?”