Secret Service leadership has accomplished the unthinkable by uniting lawmakers across the political spectrum.
As the Secret Service’s unimaginable incompetence and disorganization continues to unfold, Director Kimberly Cheatle made matters worse by interrupting Democratic and Republican lawmakers at a House oversight hearing on Monday.
By adding seasoned professionals to protect high-quality candidates, the Secret Service can rapidly improve its capabilities under new leadership.
Cheatle and others have politicized the Secret Service in the same way that the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the intelligence agencies have been politicized.The impact of DEI and other critical race theories on the Secret Service was apparent to all within seconds of the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Aside from investigations and censure for dereliction of duty, what can be done to strengthen protections for the next president and vice president, whoever they are?
A quick interim solution would be to bolster the Secret Service’s enforcement security capabilities by hiring skilled private contractors.
Under new leadership, the Secret Service can rapidly improve its capabilities by adding trained specialists such as personal security personnel, counter-snipers, logisticians and drone pilots to protect top candidates for the nation’s highest-ranking post.
This isn’t a radical idea. The prototype for today’s Secret Service emerged from private enterprise. Private investigator Allan Pinkerton, who worked as a railroad guard, uncovered a plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln during his visit to Baltimore in 1861. After the State Department failed in its mission to find and neutralize Confederate spies in Washington during the Civil War, Lincoln hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to conduct counterintelligence for the United States. Pinkerton quickly halted growing Confederate espionage in the nation’s capital, until Lincoln transferred counterintelligence to the War Department.
However, the United States had no intelligence agency behind Confederate lines, so Lincoln hired Pinkerton to set up a “Secret Service” to gather wartime intelligence in the South. One brave Pinkerton member, former New York City police officer Timothy Webster, rose to become a Confederate leader, but was captured and hanged.
President Lincoln personally paid his private agent, William A. Lloyd, as a secret, back-channel source to evaluate the intelligence he was receiving from his generals, and a few months after Lincoln’s assassination, the Treasury Department established what is today the U.S. Secret Service.
The Secret Service did not protect a president until the assassinations of both Presidents James A. Garfield and William McKinley, and Congress waited another 50 years before giving the Secret Service legal responsibility for protecting the president.
Fast forward to the recent past, when the extraordinary security measures needed to protect American civilians working in or visiting the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan stretched the U.S. military, the State Department and the Secret Service far beyond their limits. They turned to civilian resources for help.
In July 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama visited Afghanistan under the protection of Blackwater’s top security experts. that Blackwater, the company founded by Erik Prince.
Blackwater operated with extraordinary courage, efficiency and commitment in Afghanistan, Iraq and other wars.During its service in Afghanistan, Iraq and other wars, Blackwater fulfilled its mission to protect the Americans under its protection 100% of the time, 100% of the time, despite losing men in the line of duty.
Other private companies did well, but Blackwater was the brand and it set the standard. The Obama administration ultimately killed the company for reasons related to the politics of its founder and CEO.
Today’s Secret Service doesn’t just need immediate additional help from private companies. The Trump assassination attempt shows that the quality of its personnel is deeply crippled by political agendas. Privatizing the Secret Service could help quickly solve this problem.
