Editorial: Why is Secret Service dropping the ball on protecting president?

Boston Herald, Boston Herald on Jan 2, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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President Donald Trump’s Secret Service detail has one job: protect the president. Yet even after a 2024 assassination attempt in which then-candidate Trump was shot in the ear while campaigning in Butler, Pennsylvania, there are appalling lapses in security.

In September, the president went to dinner with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. He chose Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, about a block from the White House.

According to reports, when the president and company approached their table, several people who later identified themselves as members of the feminist group CODEPINK stood inches from Trump, chanting: “Free D.C., Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time.”

How did the Secret Service let them get so close?

The watchdog group Judicial Watch has been trying for three months to get information on how the protesters got advance notice about Trump’s closely-held movements, the New York Post reported.

“I’m just really concerned about the president’s safety,” Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch told The Post.

“He was almost killed twice supposedly under the protection of the Secret Service and then they walked him into a potentially dangerous ambush,” he said of the restaurant incident.

“These people were allowed to get within arm’s length of the sitting president with knives and who knows what else in the restaurant available to them,” Fitton said.

There are far too many Trump-haters out there to believe that this couldn’t happen again. Recall that the assassination attempt in July of 2024 was followed by another two months later in Florida. And the “fascist,” “Hitler,” “threat to democracy” rhetoric spewed by too many people with access to a microphone and/or the internet continue to fan the flames.

After the 2024 assassination attempts, a subsequent House task force found “Secret Service personnel with little to no experience in advance planning roles were given significant responsibility, despite the July 13 event being held at a higher-risk outdoor venue with many line of sight issues, in addition to specific intelligence about a long-range threat. Further, some of the Secret Service agents in significant advance planning roles did not clearly understand the delineation of their responsibilities.”

They’ve had over a year to fix these problems, to put more experienced agents in place. And yet protesters got within arm’s length of Trump.

Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker called the September incident “an unbelievable security lapse.

“I can’t believe they would let random people sit in that close proximity to them,” he said.

Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit Dec. 18 in Washington DC Federal Court seeking “all internal emails and text messages among USSS officials in the Presidential Protective Division regarding the presence of Code Pink protestors” at the eatery.

It also wants “all emails sent between USSS officials and any email account ending in @codepink.org.”

The government allegedly ignored a Dec. 9 deadline to provide the information under the Freedom of Information Act, according to court papers.

The FOIA-filers at Judicial Watch aren’t the only ones who want answers. The American people deserve to know: who is dropping the ball on the president’s safety?