‘Hardest Thing I Did in 22 Years’: A Retired Secret Service Agent on Trump, Harris and His Biggest Challenge

The Secret Service was already facing its biggest crisis in decades following the narrowly avoided assassination of Donald Trump. Now it has a major new task: protecting Kamala Harris not just as the sitting vice president, but as the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

And the security risks facing Harris are indeed greater simply because of who she is, as a woman and person of color — and the agency is almost certainly taking that into account.

That’s according to Jeff James, who worked in the Secret Service for 22 years and resigned in 2018 after rising to the rank of assistant special agent in charge. Over the course of his career at the agency, James served on President George W. Bush’s protective detail and pitched in from time to time to protect Trump while he was in office. James is now the president of Capitol Security Consultants , a firm that provides risk assessment and security training.

“I think you’d be surprised,” he said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, “how many people in 2024 still have a very closed mindset and think the president should be a white Christian male, and anything outside of that is unacceptable.”

James also talked about the difficulties of allocating blame for the attempted assassination of Trump given what we currently know — and don’t know. He’s not convinced Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle should have resigned despite the growing bipartisan pressure to do so, even as he refused to downplay the incident.

“We almost had a situation where we would be talking Butler, Pennsylvania, in the same breath as Dallas and Ford’s Theater,” he said, “so somebody needs to be held accountable.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This week, Kamala Harris went from being the sitting vice president to the Democrats’ likely nominee for president. What kind of changes to her protection detail would you expect or want to see given that transition?

Well, her protective detail is in a pretty high stage by virtue of her being the vice president.

I think what you may see is that since she’s going to start going to so many cities to campaign — and I’ve seen candidates in the past hit five cities in a day — what they’ll probably do is augment the vice president’s detail with people from CNOS, the Candidate Nominee Operation Section, to do the advance work. Just because the vice president’s detail doesn’t have the people to support five advance teams as well as her day-to-day protection.

What does the CNOS do?

A year ago, the Secret Service put together multiple details [in preparation for the election]. I remember there being as many as a dozen leading up to the campaign season. All they do is number them: “You’re detail one. You’re detail two. You’re detail three.” As candidates would qualify for Secret Service protection, the details would get activated.

What’s happening now is these details are sitting and waiting to be activated. One was just activated last week for JD Vance, when Donald Trump named him as his running mate. They’re going to use them for whoever Vice President Harris picks as her running mate. They’ll wait and they’ll activate them when she names somebody.

There were some years that almost every detail was used because there were so many people under protection. It was Ben Carson and Rick Santorum and Hillary Clinton, and there were so many, but this year, there was really no need for activation because the two main people who were running were under protection already. The only activation that was needed was for Mr. Vance.

For Harris in particular, how concerned would you be in terms of the threats against her? Are they bigger or different because she’s a woman and a person of color?

I will tell you throughout my career, I saw people hate candidates for every reason.

They hated Mitt Romney because he was Mormon. They hated Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. They hated the second George Bush because he was the son of privilege, and it was an unfair advantage. They hated Barack Obama because he was African American.

But being that Kamala Harris is both a woman and a person of color, I’m sure the Secret Service is prepared for the heightened threat against her.

I think you’d be surprised how many people in 2024 still have a very closed mindset and think the president should be a white Christian male, and anything outside of that is unacceptable. I don’t have any access to the intelligence surrounding Vice President Harris, but if my experience is any indicator, it is going to be a heightened level of concern for sure.

Are there any specific lessons you think the agency can take away from protecting Barack Obama as president and Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic nominee?

You need to look at the intelligence that’s right in front of you.

We got guilty for a little while after Sept. 11 of only being worried about people who fit the profile of that Middle Eastern male. Not that we forgot about things like militia groups and homegrown terrorists, but we got so focused on that one thing for a while that we had to remember, “Hey, we’ve got to stretch our legs and look at everything here.”

The Secret Service is the consumer of intelligence. We really don’t go out there and develop our own. We don’t have assets out there developing intelligence for us. We take it from the NSA and the CIA and our intelligence partners.

When they come to us and say, “We’ve got this militia group where we have somebody on the inside. They say they’re plotting a hit against Vice President Harris,” that’s actionable intelligence that we can move on. They’re just going to need to make sure that they view all actionable intelligence as the possibility that this might happen tomorrow rather than saying, “Well, she’s not going to that part of the country. This militia group is in Georgia, and she’s going to New York, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

They need to make sure that they still worry about it.

That’s a very concrete, interesting example. Does the Secret Service have to worry about things like crazy people posting on the internet ?

We take every threat seriously, and we run it to the ground.

It can come to us in several ways. One is somebody contacts [the protectee] directly — sends an email to the vice president’s office: “I’m going to kill her before she gets a chance to be elected.” Alright, we move on that.

Sometimes it comes to us through our intelligence partners, as I mentioned, but other times it comes to us through citizens. Say someone calls and says, “Hey, I was in a bar the other night, and this guy was sitting at the end of the bar. They showed Kamala Harris on the news, and he said, ‘If she gets elected, I’m getting my rifle and I’m going to D.C. and I’m going to fix the problem.’”

Now, we go out, we interview everybody. If that person tells us, “Look, I was drunk, I just lost my job, I’m frustrated, my wife says she’s going to take the kids and leave me,” and he doesn’t have any specific training, he doesn’t own weapons — alright, that’s someone whose name is going to be with us the rest of their life, but it’s not somebody we have to actively surveil or anything like that.

But if we do some research and we find out that they’re posting a lot of negative stuff, they have military training, they have access to weapons, the ability to travel — that’s something that’s actionable, that we’re going to move on pretty quickly and maybe even move toward prosecution for that.

What’s interesting, though, is that if you go all the way back to Lee Harvey Oswald, everyone who either shot a president like John Hinckley did, or like [Thomas Matthew] Crooks did, or tried to kill someone under Secret Service protection, we had never heard of any of them prior to the attack, except for one person.

That was Sara Jane Moore . She came on the Secret Service radar, and she was interviewed by an agent who deemed her not to be a threat. A couple of weeks later, she took a shot at President Ford.

Let’s turn to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which, remarkably, was less than two weeks ago. We’re talking the day after Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned as a result of that attempted assassination.

People in Washington love a high-profile scalp. But was this resignation actually justified given what we know so far about what happened?

I would have rather seen the results of the FBI investigation before any heads were put on the chopping block. What we’re hearing now reported is that yes, the Secret Service did assign local law enforcement to be on that roof. And local law enforcement walked off post.

Now, do people go back and apologize to Director Cheatle in a month when that [FBI] report comes out? Probably not.

I would have rather seen the report, and if we found out that this is systemic and the I’s aren’t getting dotted and the T’s aren’t getting crossed [in the agency], then maybe she deserves to be fired. But if we find out it was the fault of someone outside the agency, and the agency put a contingency in place to stop that, and it just wasn’t fulfilled, then I think we have a different story.

I will point out too that after the greatest intelligence failure in U.S. history — Sept. 11 — the CIA director, the FBI director and the NSA director all kept their jobs. Robert Mueller kept his [as FBI chief] for another 12 years.

Look, I get it, they’re hungry, especially the people who are fans of former President Trump. As a citizen, I want answers too, but I’m willing to wait for the answers. Let me hear what actually happened, because I don’t want to have to speculate. I don’t want to have to guess.

What are the big outstanding questions that you have at this point about failures or missteps at the Secret Service that may have occurred? Should more people lose their jobs? What are you looking for answers on?

We know dominoes fell that led to that young man being able to get on that roof. I’d like to know what dominoes fell. Who wasn’t where they should have been, and why weren’t they there?

Like I said, if it’s just that the Secret Service was negligent and didn’t assign anybody to a position that obviously posed a threat to someone under protection, then yeah, Secret Service people need to go. But if we find out that the Secret Service asked somebody to cover that and the other agency just failed to do it, then maybe someone in the other agency needs to pay.

We almost had a situation where we would be talking Butler, Pennsylvania in the same breath as Dallas and Ford’s Theater, so somebody needs to be held accountable. Absolutely. And the Secret Service is ultimately responsible for the whole ball of wax that is that protection bubble.

But you also need to be able to give someone an assignment and walk away and do your assignment and trust that they’re going to fulfill the mission you gave them. If we find out that’s what happened, it’s kind of hard to blame that site agent, it’s kind of hard to blame the director if they put the mitigations in place, but the people who they were depending on to do it had a failure.

If the policy is right but the execution is wrong, that’s a different type of thing.

Right. That’s a great way to put it.

The Secret Service has now reportedly asked the Trump campaign to stop holding large outdoor rallies . Do you think that should have happened sooner?

I certainly don’t know this, but you might see everybody — the president, the vice president, candidates — stop these outdoor rallies.

I understand, you can fit 15,000 people into an arena, but you can fit 25,000 into a fairgrounds. They want to be in front of as many people as they can. The picture looks great when the place is full.

But they are the hardest thing I did in 22 years.

Everybody now is talking about the perimeter. Where should your perimeter stop? Heavy mortars can fire from 9,000 yards away. Medium mortars can be 4,000 yards away. And you have no mitigations for that. There’s nothing you can do except try to run when you hear it come in.

When your site has thousands of yards of sight-line and trees and buildings — that’s the other thing. This little map they keep showing on TV of the building where the shooter was — if you were to expand that out on Google Maps, you’d see there are dozens of buildings. So people were saying, “Oh, the snipers just had one job to watch this one building.” No, they had dozens of buildings to look at.

I wouldn’t be shocked if you saw candidates and other people under Secret Service protection saying, “You know what? We’re just not going to do that anymore.”

I’m curious why the Secret Service would not have encouraged candidates to hold off on these large rallies — to tell them it’s not a great idea.

The thing is that they’ve just been happening forever. I walked in a couple of parades with people I protected. I walked in one of the St. Patrick’s Day parades with President Bush in Chicago, and it was just a sea of humanity on both sides of the street, just colors and people holding up their phones to take pictures.

It makes you fatigued in a way that nothing else does. You are just looking so hard for that one thing that stands out — somebody getting ready to throw something or a gun coming up over the crowd. Those outdoor events are a monster. They really are.