On January 6, the forces pulling
the country apart erupted in violence on the Capitol grounds. That day, the
president egged on his angry supporters gathered for his speech on the National
Mall, urging them to march on Congress and block lawmakers from certifying a
"stolen" election. "If you don't fight like hell, you're not
going to have a country anymore," Trump said, telling his chanting
followers they were all going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol
to give Republican lawmakers a message. "We're going to try and give them
the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."
The mob did as he asked. Thousands marched to the Capitol and quickly broke
through the police barricades on its west lawn. After another hour of battling
the police in their path, hundreds broke through the Capitol's windows and
doors, in a chilling scene that resembled newsreels from a third world country.
Inside the Senate chamber, where lawmakers had gathered to certify the
election, a small Secret Service detail whisked Vice President Pence off the
floor to a hideaway office. Only seconds later, an off-shoot of the mob,
chanting that Pence was a traitor, rushed up to a second-floor landing where
Pence and his agents had just passed.
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Despite the heroism of their
brothers in arms that day, some Secret Service personnel again took to social
media in the days after January 6, empathizing with and defending the mission
of the armed rioters who breached the Capitol - the same ones who had
endangered the Pence agents and pummeled Capitol Police officers with metal
pipes and bats. One Secret Service officer called the armed protesters
"patriots" seeking to undo an illegitimate election, and falsely
claimed to her friends that disguised Antifa members had started the violence.
One presidential detail agent reposted a popular anti-Biden screed that
criticized Democrats for their relentless attacks on Trump. It read: "I
tolerated #44 (Obama) for 8 years and kept quiet. Here is my issue with the
whole, 'let us all be a United States again' that we heard from Joe Biden. We
remember the 4 years of attacks and impeachments. We remember the resistance
and 'not our president'. We remember the president's spokesperson being kicked
out a [sic] restaurant. . . . We remember that we were called every name in the
book for supporting President Trump."
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Others shared the commentary of
pro-Trump conspiracy leaders criticizing Democrats. One agent reposted the
image of an upside-down American flag, a military signal for extreme distress,
with the words of right-wing activist Raheem Kassam: "In less than 12
months they closed our businesses, forced us to wear muzzles, kept us from our
families, killed off our sports, burned down our cities, forcibly seized power,
and shut down our speech. Then they accused *us* of the coup."
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Given all the ways the Secret
Service had enabled Trump in the last year - from enabling his authoritarian
march across Lafayette Square to the murmured support in the ranks for
overturning Biden's election - it was understandable that the president-elect
and his aides had doubts. Was the agency entrusted with Biden's life fully
committed to the assignment? So serious was this concern about Trump's
corrosive hold on the Secret Service that Biden transition advisers urged that
the agency swap out all members of the Trump presidential detail before Biden's
inauguration. Headquarters agreed to a compromise. They would bring back some
of the senior agents whom Biden knew well from his vice presidential detail and
make them supervisors on his new presidential team. Biden advisers, meanwhile,
laid plans to replace Murray in the first half of 2021. The incoming team was
disturbed by a director who would allow the Service to be used in an
authoritarian photo op and in campaign events that jeopardized the public and their
own workers' health, and let a top official cross over to a political role in
the White House. When Trump lost reelection, Murray had even returned Ornato to
the Secret Service fold, as he was not yet eligible for retirement, and
promoted him to be an assistant director.
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"The biggest tragedy is that
Trump politicized a part of the Secret Service, who pride themselves on being
apolitical," one newly departed agent explained. "That's the Trump
effect."
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Trump gave the Secret Service a
parting gift on his way out, a result of him fomenting the armed insurrection
at the Capitol and stoking alt-right extremists' dreams of overthrowing the
government. The protection agency spent the final two weeks of his
ad-ministration scrapping and rapidly rewriting its months of security plans
for the inauguration of the forty-sixth president. Newly bracing for another
violent assault, the Service directed a massive lockdown of the city unlike any
other in modern history. Their effort, coordinated with the Pentagon, the FBI,
and numerous law enforcement agencies, would encase the Capitol, the White
House, and many of the monuments of the National Mall in eight-foot-tall black
fencing, topped by razor wire in key spots near where Biden would pass. For
several days before the inauguration, security teams blocked traffic from
entering more than 350 square blocks of down-town Washington and adjoining
neighborhoods, and later shuttered thirteen subway stations in the city's core.
More than fifteen thousand National Guard soldiers were deployed to help secure
an emblematic American ceremony, an event that was typically attended by
hundreds of thousands of cheering spectators and now had to be treated as an
active target of domestic terrorists.
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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)
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