What went wrong within the Secret Service

It's been a month since the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

The Secret Service is finally, publicly accepting responsibility.

But what decisions and lack of resources led to the failure?

Today, On Point: What went wrong within the Secret Service.

Carol Leonnig, investigative reporter at the Washington Post focused on the White House and government accountability.

Nick Steen, retired Secret Service agent who worked for the agency for 27 years.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti.

For the U.S. Secret Service - July 13th began as a routine campaign event.

Agents arrived in Butler, Pennsylvania three days before Donald Trump’s rally and met with local law enforcement to develop the advanced security plan. That plan included establishing the so-called protective perimeter around the Secret Service’s protectee.

The AGR building sat about 400 feet from the stage. It was outside the protective perimeter. On July 13th, a gunman climbed to the rooftop and attempted to assassinate Former President Trump. He killed one person, and gravely wounded others.

RONALD ROWE: I went to the roof of the AGR building where the assailant fired shots and I laid in a prone position to evaluate his line of sight. What I saw made me ashamed. As a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year veteran with the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.

CHAKRABARTI: That is Acting Director of the Secret Service Ronald Rowe.

The Secret Service did not hold a public press conference about the event for quite some time. Former director Kimberly Cheatle was forced to resign on July 23.

Rowe, who has been with the Secret Service since 1999, stepped in and on August 2nd - he laid out a timeline of events that took place on July 13th.

Rowe says the security team did customary final sweeps that morning and then opened the protective space to the public at 1pm, hours before Donald Trump arrived.

According to reporting by the New York Times, at about 4:26pm, a member of the local Butler County Counter Sniper Team texted his colleagues about a suspicious individual outside the fenced area of the Butler Fair Show Grounds. By 5:38, that individual, who would later be identified as gunman Thomas Crooks, had moved to the AGR building. Another text went out among local law enforcement officers saying they should contact the Secret Service.

At 5:53pm the Secret Service Counter Sniper team leader texted the Secret Service counters sniper teams, the local law enforcement was looking for a suspicious individual outside of the perimeter, lurking around the AGR building. At this time, Secret Service personnel were operating with the knowledge that local law enforcement was working on an issue of a suspicious individual.

Seven minutes later, at 6pm, Donald Trump took the stage as planned. Meanwhile – some rally goers also noticed unusual activity on the nearby roof.

(Trump talking) Right up here. He's on the roof. He’s right there. Flat on the roof. He’s standing up now. He went flat on the roof again. Up here.

Local police were soon aware that not only was the assailant on the roof but that he had a gun. Something local police knew for about 30 seconds. Again, Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe.

And based on what I know right now, neither the Secret Service Counter Sniper teams nor members of the former president's security detail had any knowledge that there was a man on the roof of the AGR building with a firearm. It is my understanding that personnel were not aware the assailant had a firearm until they heard gunshots.

CHAKRABARTI: Crooks fired his AR-15 style weapon at 6:11pm.

Take a look at what happened (shooting/screaming).

CHAKRABARTI: One of the shots struck Trump’s right ear. Others hit people in the crowd. Within three seconds, Trump’s Secret Service detail rushed the stage and shielded the former president.

The four through eight shots took place over the next several seconds. 15 and a half seconds after the assailant's first shot, a Secret Service counter sniper fired a single round that neutralized the assailant.

CHAKRABARTI: The assassination attempt on July 13th was allowed to happen due to a cascade of errors. The ultimate responsibility lies with the Secret Service. Acting Director Rowe says he’s been consumed with the question of how this could have happened.

I thought long and hard about this. I think it was a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine that we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually want to do harm to our protectees. I think it was a failure to challenge our own assumptions, the assumptions that we know our partners are going to do everything they can, and they do this every day. But we didn't challenge our own assumptions of we assume that someone's going to cover that. We assume that there's going to be uniform presence. We didn't challenge that internally during that advance.

CHAKRABARTI: A failure of imagination. A remarkable admission, because with that phrase, Rowe is indicating that the real chain of causality that led to July 13th extends far outside Butler, Pennsylvania. It leads back to how the Secret Service operates, its practices and assumptions, and back to a series of challenges – some internal, some foisted upon the Secret Service years ago — that have been plaguing the agency for years.

Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at the Washington Post.

In 2015 she won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for her investigation on the broad misconduct and security failures within the Secret Service. She’s also the author of Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. She joins us from Washington, D.C. Welcome.

Carol, welcome to On Point.

CAROL LEONNIG: Thank you, Meghna. How are you?

CHAKRABARTI: I'm well. Now, I have to say when acting director Rowe said that in that bite that we pulled about the failure of imagination, it really struck me because here we are living in a world that's, the United States has been awash in weapons for many years.

Mass shootings are unfortunately common thing. Threat assessments are constantly done, that's the job of the Secret Service. And, their mission is zero fail. What did it, how did it strike you when he said that even in this kind of world, in this kind of environment, the Secret Service was plagued by a failure of imagination>

LEONNIG: I was really struck by that remark as well. There are many moments of his testimony, the acting director's testimony, that were very important, and resonated with the sources that I talk to all the time inside the agency. When he said he was ashamed, for example, after seeing this huge risk that hadn't been mitigated or addressed. A huge, nearly flat roof, some pitch, but nearly flat roof, 150 yards from Donald Trump.

That really captured how a lot of people fit, felt inside the agency. How could they not have addressed this? But to say a failure of imagination is striking because the Secret Service agents that I talked to who conduct advances and did conduct advances for previous presidents for years, they've been worried about line of sight and a shooter from high ground since 1963.

This is something that keeps Secret Service agents up at night before what they call the game day, before a president, a former president, a candidate, a First Lady, a vice president steps onto a stage in an open air event. They obsess about putting trucks and banners and billboards in between that line of sight to block the ability of a shooter as Kennedy was killed in Daly Plaza from a six floor open window.

Where Lee Harvey Oswald was standing with a long gun. So failure of imagination is striking. I have to take him at his word and think that acting director Rowe is also communicating something else, that the Secret Service playbook for candidates on the campaign trail is a slightly less rigorous level of protection than it is for a president.

It just has to be, there's only so many resources. There's only so much in the cupboard to go to each day to bring out countersnipers, and magnetometer teams and counter assault agents for every event, and that the president's going to get the highest priority protection, but you have to have known, every Secret Service agent has to have known that Donald Trump was a high profile protectee with a lot of people, no pun intended, gunning for him. There are a lot of people who want to hurt him, as there are many people who want to hurt President Joe Biden.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, that is really interesting.

So tell me a little bit more about what the agents and former agents that you've been speaking with, obviously over the course of many years, but in the immediate aftermath of this attempted assassination, about their response to what seems to be those inadequacies in the playbook that you talked about.

LEONNIG: First they were appalled. Appalled because, when I was rousted the day of the shooting and asked by an editor, hey, this just happened. The agents that I called, both former and more current, had the same reaction I did. How could that building not be secured enough that a man was able to get on the roof with a gun?

How? How? How? As one commander, a local police commander told me maybe a day later, Miss Leonnig your grandma could have shot Donald Trump from that location and hit him. It was that close. And it's just so obvious. Agents, current and former, also expressed, extreme dismay at the then director, Kimberly Cheatle's reaction, which was implying that the local police failed, that the local police had the outer perimeter.

It was their responsibility. Actually what we learned from our sources inside the agency was that local police had warned the Secret Service in the walk up to the Butler rally, that they were not going to be able to provide a patrol officer and a patrol car to be parked outside that AGR building that day.

So roughly 24 hours before, Butler police are saying, sorry, I know you asked us for this, but we are a tiny department and we're not going to be able to provide this. That should have been an alert to the Secret Service team handling the advance, which it's called the advance, but it's the early preliminary security planning for any event, that should have been a big red flag.

There's not going to be somebody securing this building and obviously it was easy to get atop.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Carol, obviously there's so much focus that has been on the lack of coverage of that rooftop site where Thomas Crooks made his assassination attempt.

I just want to listen to a little bit of how that was addressed in a recent congressional hearing. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri asked acting director Ronald Rowe if someone was assigned to cover that roof and didn't and here's that exchange from the hearing, Senator.

ROWE: Senator, I have heard that as well again. They posted up inside and I think moving forward, as I said earlier, we're going to ensure that state and local counter snipers are on roofs.

HAWLEY: But do you do you know if someone was supposed to be on the roof? Do you know if someone was in fact that's what the whistleblower tells me, that may or may not be accurate. Do you know that to be the fact was somebody posted to the roof, local law enforcement or whomever?

ROWE: I do not know that to be a fact.

HAWLEY: Well, can I ask you why you don't know that?

ROWE: You again, Senator, we are looking at this and they should have been on that roof and the fact that they were in the building is something that I'm still trying to understand.

HAWLEY: I just want to express my frustration, Director, that 17 days or whatever it's been that whistleblowers are telling us more than you are, and you don't know, you haven't ascertained if there was supposed to be law enforcement on the roof.

CHAKRABARTI: So Carol Leonnig, just to be clear, who is in charge of crafting the security plan for a campaign event?

LEONNIG: The Secret Service. And actually, the advance in security planning is crafted by often an advance agent who's assigned from the field office. There are many field offices for the Secret Service all over the country. And the Pittsburgh office was responsible for this advance, but it was signed off on, either explicitly or implicitly, by the presidential, forgive me, Donald Trump's security detail would have been read in on this plan, because they're going to be a character in this security plan.

They're going to bring the former president onto the stage, that they would have reviewed, the head of his detail would have reviewed this plan and the head of the Pittsburgh field office, along with headquarters office of protective operations, which oversees how many agents, how many resources each event is devoted, is given.

All of those players would have been involved in this security plan, but the Secret Service, end of story, Meghna, is responsible for the entire plan. Perimeter, inside, outer perimeter. Lots of times the Secret Service will cede and delegate the responsibility for outside the perimeter to local police and ask them to keep a watch and make sure this works.

And they'll give them specific assignments. But you know what I heard from sources was that the clarity with which the Secret Service communicated what local police were supposed to do, how they were supposed to address threats was not that clear. And I think there's another issue, which is in this instance, one of the cascades, one of the pieces of the cascade of failures, is that there was not a clear way in which local police were supposed to communicate suspicious man.

And potential threat and guy with a gun, the way those were communicated were often delayed, and in some cases never received.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so we have a moment from the congressional hearing where this communication issue was addressed, and for folks in the studio, this is clip number two. And here is what acting director Ronald Rowe said about why Trump's security detail, once there was a known unusual activity, perhaps not known to the Secret Service, but at least known to local law enforcement.

Why the detail didn't pull Trump off the stage sooner? And here's what Rowe said.

ROWE: Senator, if we'd had that information, they would have been able to address it more quickly. It appears that that information was stuck or siloed in that state and local channel. It is troubling to me that we did not get that information as quickly as we should have We didn't know that there was this incident going on and the only thing we had was that Locals were working in issue at the three o'clock, which would have been the former president's right hand side, which is where the shot came nothing about man on the roof. Nothing about man with a gun. None of that information ever made it over our net.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Carol, so I've got so many follow-up questions on this. So first of all, clearly there was inadequate communication, but do you know from your sources what ideally the communication channels between local law enforcement and the Secret Service are supposed to be like?

LEONNIG: Know what they are for a president, and less detail what they would have been for a former president, who's running for office and is the Republican nominee. You know, Donald Trump is very exceptional in the Secret Service playbook, but typically, in an event, including in a candidate event, there should be on site, what's called a Secret Service command post or security room.

And that is a place where any incoming information should be passed and then that Secret Service official who's responsible for communications should get onto the separate radio frequency of the Secret Service detail. Trump's security detail is on a different radio frequency than the rest of all the local police that are there.

There's a reason for that. They don't need to know every little thing about a bus that's trapped or a woman who's fainted or a kid that's lost, they don't need that distraction. So they're on a separate radio frequency. The core and central role of the command post or the security room is to pass critical information to those who need it on the Secret Service teams.

We reported, my colleague and I reported for the first time that the Secret Service detail for Donald Trump did not have any previous warning of a suspicious man or potentially with a gun. None. They could have pulled him off the stage as soon as they heard that. They could have also delayed taking him on the stage, which would have been the much more typical route here.

Suspicious man, we're looking for somebody, we're a little bit worried about this area. And the detail, if that had been relayed to them from the command post or the security room, then they would have said, okay let's take a beat. Let's just sit in the suburban for a little while longer until this gets resolved or this mystery gets solved.

And again, we reported for the first time and broke the news that his detail had no clue until the shots rang out. And you can see that Meghna, in the event, because Donald Trump is standing there alone, feeling the blood from his ear, and he makes the decision upon hearing the crackling to duck, good on him.

His detail didn't get to him in time, because their first alert were the actual shots.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I go back for a second to what we heard acting director Rowe say earlier in response to that questioning of, why wasn't there coverage on the roof? And it seems as if he answers pretty candidly.

We haven't yet been able to figure that out. That says something about the Secret Service's ability right now at this moment to get clarity on what its own plans were. That seems a little unusual to me. What do you think about that?

LEONNIG: I think there are two things going on, and it's so smart for you to highlight it.

One of the things that's going on is the Secret Service is badly bruised and doesn't want to make a misstep and missay something when they don't have control of all the information. As I reported with my colleague, Josh Dawsey, they said that there had been in the past, no denials by the Secret Service for any extra assets or resources for Donald Trump, when his detail asked for them on campaign events.

And they didn't apologize, but they had to basically correct that and say after we did some reporting that was wrong, that it was absolutely false. So the Secret Service and the director now stepping into the shoes of a person who's just been removed for missteps and misstatements is not going to fall into that problem. The other is that the service does not want to appear anymore.

Although Kimberly Cheatle, former director who resigned, forced to resign, she made this misstep. This new director doesn't want to imply that the Locals messed up, it's ultimately on the Secret Service's head. I want to say one thing more, if you don't mind, which is about that communication that we also were hearing about in real time, that about 10 minutes before, there were local police reporting, quote, working an issue at three o'clock. Working an issue at three o'clock says, okay, as the dial of the clock fits, somebody near that AGR building, there's some police, they're working an issue, but working an issue could not be more boring a statement. It doesn't say suspicious person.

It doesn't say guy with a range finder. It doesn't say person with a backpack near a building that we don't have secured. Working at issue at three o'clock tells nobody almost anything. So it is a problem that local police weren't more clear, and the Secret Service probably does not want to step into the shoes of looking like they're casting blame for that incredibly vague statement.

CHAKRABARTI: You're listening to Carol Leonnig. She is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post, has been reporting on the Secret Service for years. She's also author of Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. And Carol, hang on here for just a second, because I want to bring Nick Steen into the conversation.

He is a retired Air Secret service agent. He worked at the agency for 27 years, including on presidential details for George HW Bush, as well as protective operations for five sitting presidents, including for Donald Trump when he was a candidate in 2016. Nick Steen, welcome to On Point.

NICK STEEN: Hi, Meghna. Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So really appreciate your insight today to help us understand where the Secret Service is as an agency. But can you first tell me, I think a lot of people are still wondering why that AGR building was, as far as I can understand, outside the protective perimeter, the so called protective perimeter, even though it was 147-ish feet away from the stage and clearly in the line of sight of the stage. Do you have any insight as to why that decision might have been made?

STEEN: I don't have any particular insight on what their thinking was with the plan that day, but I would say that, obviously, in hindsight, looking at it, it probably should have been something that was swept and secured.

And that's when you're talking about a perimeter, a secure perimeter, what we generally are talking about is the area where people are within a pistol range of the protectee. And by that, you mean you sweep all the people coming in. So they all have to go through a magnetometer. There are bomb dogs that sweep that area.

As that radius goes out, they determine how high is the threat level from probably a explosive device. And then if you start figuring in things like a sniper, which could be 500, 1,000 yards out. So a perimeter is really a vague term for the Secret Service. Should that building have been secured and swept in that area, so that no people were milling around or could walk into that area. I think absolutely hindsight proves that.

CHAKRABARTI: You know, you just heard Carol talk about the communications that went on before shots were actually fired at 6:11 p.m. When the suspicious activity from Crooks was first identified by local law enforcement, as far as we can tell, what's the usual protocol when something like that happens, when someone is acting oddly?

Because it seems like they observed him for a while, but maybe nothing was done to intercede with him.

STEEN: Yeah, as a general protocol, what would happen in that scenario, if local law enforcement relayed to the Secret Service that they had a suspicious individual or a suspicious something going on the outside of the perimeter, we would respond with what we usually call a protective intelligence team, which usually consists of a Secret Service agent and a local law enforcement officer, for that communication reason.

And they would go out and try to ascertain what it is, is it someone that needs to be taken into custody, interviewed and that would keep that open line of communication back to the Secret Service security room. That's what about this whole event is most surprising to me, and I really would like the answers on, is why was there no level of communication from the local law enforcement to the security room.

Because that's the essential purpose of the security room is you have a Secret Service agent or agents in there monitoring the radio traffic, along with our local state and local counterparts.

So that if something comes over a state or local radio band, that is immediately heard and relayed over the Secret Service bands to the people that need to know. And that apparently was not going on, why there was no one that had communication directly with the teams that were around the AGR Building in the security room is the biggest mystery to me.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, you heard Carol a little earlier. She was talking about how obviously the protocol around the sitting president and the protection of that person, that the president gets the most careful attention and perhaps the playbook for candidates is a little different.

That's what's being scrutinized now, but it's so interesting to me. And I'd love to get your expertise on this, that you were on Donald Trump's 2016 protective detail back when he was a candidate. I don't know how much you can walk us through what that was like and the level of preparation that went into Trump's 2016 candidate rallies when you were on his detail.

STEEN: Certainly, another way I can describe it. It was different. It didn't really change anything about our protocols or how we approached securing events. But the atmosphere of the events certainly seemed different in 2016. And I think that was not limited to Donald Trump as a candidate.

You saw different events at candidates such as Bernie Sanders and even Hillary Clinton. That there was just a different type of feel or level of excitement at these rallies that we really had not really seen at presidential campaign events before. The level of the crowds, or the number of people in the crowds was greater.

It just had a different feel to it. And then certainly, there were a lot of events that the Secret Service used to, occasionally would happen, but became more and more routine, like people jumping over barricades, attempting to get on the stage and that sort of thing. So 2016 really did, as far as a presidential campaign, I've been on a lot of them. Had a certainly, had a different feel to it.

CHAKRABARTI: Would you say that the level of resources that the Secret Service has for candidates is different from that of a sitting president, because I think what Carol highlighted is really important for us to understand, what is the gap in the resources that the Secret Service has available to protect candidates, especially in how intense modern campaigns are.

STEEN: Sure. There's no doubt in that. I think any reasonable person would assume that to be true. As a sitting president, there's a lot of factors, as far as the continuity of our government, that has to ask the real purpose of the Secret Service, and the protection of the president is make sure that individual can make the decisions they need to without fear of reprisal or being in danger because of who they are and what they are.

So that's a major part of it. And candidates, they don't receive the same level, but you also got to remember they're not, in most cases, they're not in the order of succession. Right now, we have a vice president that is out on the campaign trail. So that does create different dynamics for that that detail as well.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: We've talked a lot about the roof. We've talked a lot about law enforcement, local law enforcement and secret service communication failures, but it also seems as if there were some exceptions to protocol that took place even after the shots were fired, towards the former president. A few seconds, just a few seconds after the shots were fired, of course, his detail did rush the stage, through their bodies over Donald Trump to protect him.

And then we hear over the Secret Service communications, some important exchange of information, and here it is.

(CROWD NOISE) Hawkeye is here. We ready. Are we go. Shooter is down. Are we good to move? Clear. Let’s move. (SHOUTS)

TRUMP: Let me get my shoes. Let me get my shoes.

Hold on to your head it’s bloody. Sir, we need to get to the car.

TRUMP: Let me get my shoes.

Watch out. (SCREAMS)

CHAKRABARTI: It was just momentarily thereafter where Trump raised his head and his fist and shouted fight, fight. Carol, what stands out to you about that moment is exceptional?

LEONNIG: I want to start, I really am keen to hear what Nick thinks as well. But I want to start with the comparison to what happened on 9/11 when Dick Cheney, then the Vice President, inside a building in the White House, in his office, was nearly lifted out of his chair by his belt loops by ... his detail that day, who had been alerted by radio frequency from headquarters that there was a suspicion of an inbound plane heading, hijacked and heading towards the White House.

That agent did not wait for Vice President Cheney to feel comfortable about departing his office. He nearly ripped him off the floor and hustled him down the stairs to the bunker where they wanted to basically make sure, as Nick pointed out earlier, that the continuity of government continued, in case anything happened to President Bush, who was in the air at the time, in case anything happened to him.

They wanted to be sure there was somebody running the government and the country in the United States in Washington, D.C. There was no like, let's see how you feel about this. With Donald Trump saying, there were three key moments in that radio transmission. One is Hawkeye is here. That's the counter assault team, which at that point was really only two counter assault agents from the Secret Service and some supplemental tactical teams from local police.

Those two people who were in black tactical gear with long guns, pointing their guns at the crowd. They are Hawkeye. They are there to help Trump and his detail cover them and let them evacuate. Then the next thing you hear is shooters down. Okay, good. That means we're clear to go.

We've got cover and there is no current shooter, but there could be a second shooter, right? There could be an onslaught of other people coming. And that's why it stunned me to hear, let me get my shoes, let me get my shoes and everybody trying to accommodate Donald Trump and let him do his fist bump.

For the cameras, that hey, he wants to show the crowd, I'm alive. I'm good. It was not a lot of seconds, but it is strange to me that was allowed, because there could have been any other threat on the horizon. And speed is the issue with the Secret Service. They talk about there being three seconds between you and seven shots.

So why not move him more quickly? It seems because Donald Trump called the tune in those moments.

CHAKRABARTI: Nick Steen, let me turn to you on this, because as far as my count on the videos that that we've seen of that moment Trump was able to raise his head above the protective detail around him once on the stage, once going down the stairs, and again, another time before getting right into his SUV.

What, can you explain that?

STEEN: I will add this. You can't protect someone from themselves. Is a misnomer or not a misnomer, but something that's talked about. I think the comparison with evacuating vice president Cheney, 9/11, a little different circumstance than what was going on in Butler, Pennsylvania that day.

Obviously if Mr. Vice President Cheney had resisted or said, Hey, I want to, whatever, we would not have accommodated him, but we would have, if he's pushing back and we're trying to push him forward, there might have been a second or two difference. And I think that was what you saw there, there's a lot of things that were happening in that few seconds that you've got to really understand from the Secret Service detail, the detail that's around Former president Trump at the time.

One is once they're on top of him and down behind the ballistic material, they weren't taking fire. Nobody was being hit. So once they heard that the counter assault team was in place, they also had to assess, they had a protectee with a head wound at the time, I'm sure they had no idea the seriousness of that wound, how ambulatory he was, how quickly they could move him, or if they could move him at all.

So they had to take a second or two to assess that and then moving towards the vehicles, which would be normal protocol, would I have liked to have seen a little more alacrity and speed when they moved? Yes, but I think I've seen the video of them moving. The general view is that one of looking directly at the stage.

I've seen views as well from behind and from behind the stage. And they do a pretty good job. Good job, realistically of covering and evacuating him. He's not a small man. He's a large man. I think the shoes thing, we didn't stop for him to pick up his shoes. I say, we, they didn't stop to pick up his shoes.

In fact, you can see an agent throw his shoes off stage to get them out of the way so that they're not in the way as they're taking him down the stairs off stage. I think overall it was pretty good movement by the detail. I'm sure we can go back and look at the film and I'm sure they will in training, on things they might be, could do a little better.

We always do that. But overall from the time that you have a protectee go down, you determine that they're wounded. You determine if the shots are still coming. Yeah, Carol's correct. You don't really know the entire situation. Were there other shooters? But I think overall, they did pretty much what they were trained to do that day.

CHAKRABARTI: I have to ask, though, and respectfully, I want to just point out the obvious, that we're talking about agents who are literally willing to put their lives on the line every day, right? And who's who have promised, who have sworn to take a bullet for another person.

And the honor in that duty, I don't want to disrespect at all. But at the same time, protecting someone from themselves, I would think is exactly what the Secret Service is supposed to do in a crisis situation like that. Because, especially if we're dealing with someone who wishes to be in the White House or even someone who's in the line of succession.

Zero fail, does that not mean doing everything in the details power to keep their protectee covered, safe and moved as quickly as possible when a threat situation is ongoing?

STEEN: No, that's the main goal. The one thing that the details job is to do is to cover and evacuate and remove that protectee as far from the threat as quickly as possible.

I mean that is the one thing. But at the same time, if a protectee doesn't want to cover, doesn't want to put his head down, doesn't resist moving forward, they do push him along pretty well, and that's generally what you have to do. And the other thing is you've got to remember too, there's a lot of adrenaline, excitement not knowing what's going on in the brain, has to process all that at the same time and all this is going on.

Would I be asking where my shoes were if someone was shooting at me? I don't know. But that's the sort of thing that happens. And I think that's where training really has to kick in. And I think if there was any critique or from just viewing what the detail is, training creates muscle memory.

And so that when you were involved in something like that, the training immediately takes over, the muscle memory takes over and you just do what you have to do. And so there were certain things within that evacuation that I saw that said, Hey, probably there could be a little more training on some of those individuals for that.

But again, that's just a Monday morning quarterback kind of critique. But I would say overall, training is a major issue within the Secret Service and has been for years. Because of the operational pace. It's very difficult at times to take that time out to go train. Because you have the mission never stops, never pauses.

CHAKRABARTI: Nick, one last question for you. When you were on Trump's detail as he was a candidate in 2016, what was the relationship like between members of the Secret Service detail and candidate Donald Trump then?

STEEN: I think overall it was very friendly. They were certainly initially very curious, what do we do?

How do we do it? I had conversations with candidate nominee and president elect Trump several times about things that were going on or what he could expect. And then as well as family members, when they began receiving Secret Service protection, a lot of them had questions about what we do, how we do it.

And so they were inquisitive. I think overall it was a friendly relationship. There was never, I can't remember too many occurrences at all where we offered advice or suggested things that they were terribly resistant to. Now I have a photo that I really like. It shows my detail leader one day when we were working and President Trump wanted to go behind the stage at a rally to wave to the crowd that was behind him.

And it was full of electrical wires and speakers and lights. And it just was not safe and the detail could not effectively get around him to cover him if he did that. And so you can see in the photograph, you can see the displeasure on his face as he's being told no by the detail leader.

And I always commented this is probably one of the few times he's ever been told no. But he responded, did as we asked. And that was generally the relationship we had with him.

CHAKRABARTI: Nick Steen worked for the Secret Service for 27 years, including on presidential details for George H. W. Bush, as well as protective operations for five sitting presidents. Nick, thank you so much for joining us today.

STEEN: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Carol Leonnig, what does your reporting and your sources tell you about the relationship that Donald Trump has with his Secret Service detail? Because I recall even in the aftermath of January 6th, there were some dueling reports about what Trump may or may not have demanded from his detail as they were moving him, for example, towards the White House during January 6th.

So what do you know about that relationship?

LEONNIG: In 2016 Nick nailed it when he talked about how it was quote-unquote different. That is the Secret Service euphemism for there was a lot more drama on campaign events. And Donald Trump amped up the rhetoric, as did some of his opponents.

And there was a lot of excitement and almost like an angriness in the air too, in the way Donald Trump talked about America and making America great again, as his slogan went. There were some Secret Service agents who were on his detail who were very uncomfortable, right? They were newbies assigned to him.

It wasn't like they had a choice. And there were some who were a little bit uncomfortable with that rhetoric, because as you remember from some of those campaign events, he encouraged people to throw protesters out. And in some of them, there was violence in which protesters of his positions, particularly about Muslim nations and immigration policy, protesters were pushed and shoved and harassed at his urging that made some Secret Service agents very nervous.

But as time went on, and as Donald Trump became president, he engendered incredible admiration and friendship from Secret Service agents, which is not unusual for presidential detail, right? A lot of presidential detail agents become close to and admiring of the president they're protecting.

The president would ask them about their personal lives and nickname them and say hey to them in the mornings. And there became that closeness. But there's another thing to remember, which is that the agency writ large, and law enforcement writ large, leans red, leans conservative. And I began to notice in my conversations with people and sources at the agency, that there was a political alignment of some of his detail agents with Donald Trump, especially in the walk up to January 6th.

And I reported at the time that some of the people on PPD, the presidential protection division, they were posting on their personal social media platforms, especially Facebook, upside down flags and criticism of Joe Biden and criticism that the election had probably, in their view, been stolen. And some of them went so far as to post messages hailing the people who had breached the Capitol on January 6th as patriots.

I'm not saying this was widespread, but I'm saying it was noticeable. For law enforcement agents who protected Trump and worked for the Secret Service, they're supposed to be apolitical and objective, were clearly taking a political stand that was pro Trump, pro January 6th attack and breach, an attack that injured more than a hundred law enforcement officers, their friends in blue.

So it was really striking, and his security detail now very much aligned with him and took some criticism because the agents on the detail had started all wearing red ties to show their sort of symbiotic relationship with Donald Trump. And the agency said, you better watch it.