Carol Leonnig
Trump family members got ‘inappropriately close’
to Secret Service agents, book claims
Concerns over bonds involving Trump’s then daughter
in-law Vanessa and daughter Tiffany revealed in Carol Leonnig’s Zero Fail
Martin
Pengelly in New York
@MartinPengelly
Tue 11 May
2021 15.15 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/11/trump-family-members-secret-service
Two Trump
family members got “inappropriately – and perhaps dangerously – close” to
agents protecting them while Donald Trump was president, according to a new
book on the US Secret Service.
Zero Fail:
The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, by the Washington Post reporter Carol
Leonnig, is published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Leonnig won
a Pulitzer prize in 2015, for her reporting on security failures at the Secret
Service. She was also part of the Post team which won a Pulitzer for its work
on Edward Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance
techniques and reported extensively on Russian election interference and links
between Trump and Moscow. She has also won three Polk awards.
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 with 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 judgement.
Both
Tiffany Trump and the agent said nothing untoward was happening, Leonnig
writes, and pointed out the nature of the agent’s job meant spending time alone
with his charge. The agent was subsequently reassigned.
Leonnig
also reports that it was not clear if Donald Trump knew what Secret Service personnel
were saying about his daughter and daughter-in-law.
But she
says the president did repeatedly seek to remove Secret Service staff he deemed
to be overweight or too short for the job.
“I want
these fat guys off my detail,” Trump is reported to have said, possibly
confusing office-based personnel with active agents. “How are they going to
protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”
