In another shocking revelation, whistleblowers have told Missouri Senator Josh Hawley that Secret Service personnel are "woefully unprepared" and given inadequate training to properly protect candidates – including Trump.
During an appearance on the Fox News Channel, Hawley revealed that the whistleblowers now claim Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents were reassigned to work on the protective details and were given a single two-hour online course that was plagued with technical problems.
“When Homeland Security Investigations agents partner with the Secret Service, they should be properly trained. New whistleblower allegations contend this isn’t happening and that HIS agents reassigned to candidate details – including former President Trump’s – are woefully unprepared for the job,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe earlier this week.
Unhelpful training content
The whistleblower told Hawley a Secret Service employee was unable to get the audio to function on pre-recorded training videos. The employee restarted the video “approximately six times,” and the content was not “helpful,” the whistleblower said.
Ken Valentine served 24 years with the Secret Service, including 10 years with the Presidential Protection detail, and is the author of Cheating Death.
“I'm glad that whistleblowers are coming forward," he tells AFN. "I certainly wish that they had come forward sooner to describe the training as poor. I think they said the content was ineffective or not helpful. That would have been good to know well before they were put into use.”
Valentine says it is very common for the Secret Service to utilize HSI agents for some of the security. It’s uncommon for these lesser-trained agents, he adds, to guard a former president or to be placed in positions that require quick judgment.
“They go through a minimal amount of training and they are put in positions where they have a minimal amount of discretion, but they're not supposed to be in positions of high discretion. You would use Secret Service agents who receive the full training to have those high discretion positions, and certainly the detail that's protecting Trump,” Valentine says.
