When the 2013 film White House Down came out, the Secret Service took notice that one of their own was making the media rounds. Thanks to the Decoding Culture Foundation and PsyOp Cinema, a simple email from the archives confirms this awareness:
The movie plot features Jamie Foxx as the black president who makes an unpopular move in the Middle East and then, in his own “white” house, he gets targeted for assassination by a disgruntled “white nationalist” group.
Of course.
U.S. president James Sawyer makes a controversial proposal to sign a peace agreement with other nations to remove military forces from the Middle East. Divorced veteran John Cale works as a Capitol Police officer assigned to Speaker of the House Eli Raphelson, whose nephew he saved while serving in Afghanistan. Cale hopes to impress his 11-year-old daughter, Emily, by interviewing for the Secret Service and getting tickets for them to tour the White House. His interviewer, Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge Carol Finnerty, a college acquaintance, deems him unqualified for the job.
A bomb is detonated in the United States Capitol, sending Washington, D.C. into lockdown. Finnerty escorts Raphelson to an underground command center in the Pentagon, while Vice President Alvin Hammond is taken aboard Air Force One. A paramilitary team led by corrupt former Delta Force operator Emil Stenz infiltrates the White House, after killing various Secret Service agents, seizes the first family’s home. The tour group is taken hostage in the Blue Room by white nationalist Carl Killick, but Cale escapes to search for Emily, who was separated from the rest of the tour group. Retiring Head of Presidential Detail Martin Walker brings Sawyer to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), beneath the White House Library. Inside, Walker kills Sawyer’s task forces and reveals himself as the commander of the White House attack; he is evidently seeking vengeance against Sawyer for a botched mission in Iran that killed his Marine son Kevin a year earlier.
Unsurprisingly, this movie echoed real-life tensions simmering at the time between the Secret Service and the Obama Administration, though the “morale” problem was attributed to shifting administrative oversight of this agency from the Treasury Department to the relatively new Department of Homeland Security.
Here’s an NPR article describing these tensions, with Mickey Nelson making an appearance to help publicize these Secret Service problems.
Low morale could be partly to blame for the recent spate of security lapses at the Secret Service.
The agency with the responsibility for protecting the president, vice president and their families rates in the bottom third in job satisfaction rankings within the federal government.
The root of that discontent could be bureaucratic. The Secret Service, which was created in 1865 to fight counterfeiters, traces its heritage back to the U.S. Treasury Department. It didn’t get into the business of protecting presidents until 1901 after the assassination of President McKinley.
After the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the service was transferred from Treasury to the newly created Department of Homeland Security. It became one of 22 agencies thrown together in response to the terrorist attack.
…
Like other federal agencies, the Secret Service lost part of its funding due to the sequester of the operating budget last year.
Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary at the time, vowed that those cuts would not be taken from the protective side of the service’s budget. In fact, Congress gave the service more money than it asked for last year because lawmakers felt the Obama administration had underfunded the agency.
But Mickey Nelson, former assistant Secret Service director, says he agrees there has been much more scrambling for resources since the service became part of Homeland Security.
“The Secret Service mission pretty much stayed the same, unlike some of the other agencies that were brought over,” Nelson says. “Now, what has happened over a period of time, of course, you’ve got quite a few components within DHS fighting for what seems to be an increasingly smaller budget.”
What kind of security lapses had the Secret Service already experienced by 2014? According to this NBC article, several. Here they are in sequential order:
November 2009: A Washington couple, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, crash Obama’s first state dinner. The Secret Service later acknowledges that officers never checked whether they were on the guest list. A photo emerges showing that they shook hands with the president. Sullivan, the director, says that he is “deeply concerned and embarrassed” by the breach. The Salahis parlay their fame into an undistinguished career in reality TV.
November 2011: A man with a semiautomatic rifle parks in front of the White House and fires at the building, with Sasha Obama inside and Malia Obama on her way home. A Secret Service supervisor, mistaking the shots for car backfire, orders officers to stand down. The service does not figure out that shots hit the building for four days, and only then because a housekeeper noticed broken glass. The president and first lady are infuriated, The Post reports years later.
April 2012: Eight Secret Service agents doing advance work for a presidential trip to a summit in Colombia lose their jobs after allegations that some took prostitutes from a strip club back to their hotel rooms. A Justice Department investigation finds that two Drug Enforcement Administration agents arranged one encounter between a prostitute and a Secret Service officer. Obama later says: “When we travel, we have to observe the highest standards.”
May 2013: A Secret Service supervisor leaves a bullet in a woman’s room at the Hay-Adams hotel, which overlooks the White House, and allegedly tries to force his way into the room to retrieve it. An investigation finds that the supervisor and a colleague sent sexually suggestive emails to a woman subordinate. The supervisor loses his job, and the colleague is reassigned. A Secret Service spokesman says: “Periodically we have isolated incidents of misconduct, just like every organization does.”
March 2014: Three Secret Service agents responsible for protecting Obama in Amsterdam are placed on leave after a night of drinking, in violation of Secret Service rules. One of the agents is passed out drunk in a hallway, The Post reports. The newspaper reports that the three are part of what is known as the counter assault team, a last line of defense responsible for fighting off assailants if the president or his motorcade comes under attack.
Sept. 16, 2014: In perhaps the most chilling of the Secret Service lapses, a security contractor with a gun and an assault record gets on an elevator with the president during a trip to Atlanta. The Post, citing people familiar with the incident, reports that the contractor used his cellphone to take video of Obama and did not stop when Secret Service agents told him to. The Secret Service only learns that the man has a gun when he is fired on the spot and turns it over. Obama was not told, The Post reports.
Sept. 19, 2014: An Iraq war veteran with a knife jumps the White House fence, dashes through the North Portico doors and makes it deep inside the building, into the East Room, before he is tackled, and only then by an off-duty Secret Service agent. The Secret Service first says only that the man was apprehended after getting in the door. A congressman tells The Post that a security alarm was disabled because staff nearby found it too noisy.
By the time Trump’s team took over, the Secret Service moved from having sex with hookers to having sex with actual members of the Trump family.
Wow.
With Philip Rucker, Leonnig also co-authored A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America, a well-received 2020 White House exposé.
In her new book, she writes that Secret Service agents reported that Vanessa Trump, the wife of the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, “started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family”.
Vanessa Trump filed for an uncontested divorce in March 2018. Leonnig reports that the agent concerned did not face disciplinary action as neither he nor the agency were official guardians of Vanessa Trump at that point.
Leonnig also writes that Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail”.
Secret Service leaders, the book says, “became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent”.
Agents are prohibited from forming personal relationships with those they protect, out of concern that such feelings could cloud their judgment.
The clouded judgement of the people tasked with keeping the President and his family safe is still a concern, of course, but it’s a concern that has to compete with more pressing issues, like a Holy War going nuclear.
In the fantasy world of Hollywood movie-making, the Sawyer/Obama figure thwarts the white nationalists, names “Cale” to his security detail, and ends all wars.
Sawyer names Cale his new special agent and takes him and Emily on an aerial tour of D.C. on Marine One. During the tour, Sawyer receives word that other nations have agreed to his peace deal after learning of the events at the White House, calling for an end to all wars.
And in the real world, in 2026, even shit heels like Jack Posobiec know who they have to thank for the 11-3 bloodbath.
And what do the American people deserve, Jack? Maybe we’ll address that question in a future post.
Until then, thanks for reading.