# United States Secret Service The **U.S. Secret Service** is the [[Department of Homeland Security]] component with two missions that have nothing to do with each other: protecting the president, vice president, their families, former presidents and visiting heads of state, and investigating counterfeiting and financial crime — its original 1865 Treasury mandate, from the era when a third of circulating currency was fake. Presidential protection was added after the [[McKinley Assassination]] in 1901; the agency moved from Treasury to DHS in the 2003 reorganization. It links from twelve vault folders because almost everything that physically happens *to* a president — an attack, an evacuation, a decoy flight, a fence, a ballroom — runs through it. ## 2024: Butler and the leadership collapse The [[Butler Assassination Attempt]] of July 13, 2024 — a gunman on an unsecured roof 130 metres from the stage, one spectator killed, Trump wounded — was the worst protective failure since 1981, and a second attempt at Trump's West Palm Beach golf club followed on September 15. Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned July 23, 2024; an independent review panel found the failures systemic and recommended an outsider as director. Trump instead appointed [[Sean Curran]] — the agent who had led his detail since 2021 and physically shielded him at Butler — as the 28th director on January 22, 2025. ## 2025–26: the protector as political instrument Curran's tenure has had two faces. The reform face: a recruitment drive (including a Super Bowl ad), reassignments of senior staff, and repeated budget requests, against GAO and inspector-general reports through mid-2026 documenting persistent workforce-planning gaps and overtime dependence. The political face is what the vault's Events pages record: - **[[WHCD Shooting]]** (April 26, 2026) — a gunman at the Washington Hilton was subdued by agents; Trump, Vance and the First Lady evacuated. The agency's competence was, for once, not the story. - **[[Air Force One Decoy Operation]]** — after credible Iranian threat intelligence at the [[NATO Summit Ankara 2026]], Trump was moved off the 747 in a catering truck and flown home on a C-32 while the decoy carried the press. Disclosed a month later by the *Washington Post*. - **[[NYT Air Force One Subpoenas]]** — the Service's own flagged security concerns about the Qatari-gifted 747-8, rushed into service without full protective modifications, became a *Times* story; the leak hunt that followed subpoenaed four reporters. The agency's professional judgment was the leak. - **[[White House Ballroom Project]]** and **[[Lafayette Square Fencing Plan]]** — protective rationales supplied for construction and enclosure decisions whose motives are contested on those pages. The through-line: an agency whose protective mandate is non-partisan by design is now led by the protectee's own detail chief, and its security assessments are being used both as the justification for presidential projects and as the object of leak prosecutions. ## Older files The Service appears in the vault's history pages as a counterintelligence and surveillance actor as much as a bodyguard: the [[JFK Assassination Conspiracy]] and [[Church Committee Hearings (1975)]] pages for its protective-intelligence files, [[MK-Ultra]] and [[Surveillance State]] for its early role in threat-monitoring, and the [[Oklahoma City Bombing]] page for the loss of its Murrah Building field office. Its financial-crimes half surfaces on [[Avvy LLC]] and the [[Crypto-Political Machine]] pages. ## See Also - [[Department of Homeland Security]] · [[Sean Curran]] · [[Donald Trump]] - [[Butler Assassination Attempt]] · [[WHCD Shooting]] · [[Air Force One Decoy Operation]] · [[NYT Air Force One Subpoenas]] - [[White House Ballroom Project]] · [[Lafayette Square Fencing Plan]] - [[Surveillance State]] · [[Federal Agencies]]