# Sean Curran **Sean M. Curran** has been the 28th **Director of the [[United States Secret Service]]** since January 2025. The directorship is a presidential appointment that needs no Senate confirmation. He came to it straight from leading the President's personal protective detail. ## Background Curran joined the Secret Service in 2001, was assigned early to then-Senator Barack Obama's detail, and was named the agency's special agent of the year in 2007. He was deputy supervisor on Trump's presidential detail in the first term and head of Trump's personal detail afterward. He was the agent at Trump's right in the photographs from **Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024** ([[Butler Assassination Attempt]]), and he was on the detail for the September 2024 West Palm Beach attempt as well. Trump named him director shortly after the second inauguration, replacing acting director Ronald Rowe, who had run the agency since Kimberly Cheatle resigned over Butler. ## As director - **Personnel philosophy.** He has rejected his predecessor's diversity hiring goals in favor of what he calls putting "the right people on the field." - **The threat load.** In July 2026 he described the environment around protectees as "very volatile," with about 10,000 threats investigated that year. - **The loyalty question.** No director has come to the job with a closer personal bond to the protectee. Curran has said of Butler, "I didn't want to leave his side. I think he probably didn't want me to leave his side, either." That bond is the reason he got the job. It is also why the agency's independence from the person it protects is now an open question. ## The press ban, September 2026 That question became concrete in September 2026. On **September 19** Secret Service officers carried out the [[White House Press Ban]]: they turned CNN, MS NOW and Politico correspondents away at the gates and **seized press badges**. On September 21 the three outlets sued, naming Curran as a defendant with [[Donald Trump]], [[Susie Wiles]] and [[Steven Cheung]] ([[CNN]], [[MSNBC]], [[Politico]]). On **September 24** Judge [[Timothy Kelly]], a Trump appointee who granted CNN's Jim Acosta the same kind of order in 2018, issued a 14-day temporary restraining order. He found a likely Fifth Amendment due-process violation and wrote that nothing in the record before the suit suggested the revocations "was motivated by national security concerns." Credentials were reactivated that morning, although at least one CNN crew was still turned away at first. The case puts the Secret Service in a role it was not built for. Its statutory job is protection, and here its agents carried out an exclusion on editorial grounds. The directorship is now part of a press-access dispute because the person who runs it is the President's own former bodyguard. ## See also - [[United States Secret Service]] · [[Department of Homeland Security]] · [[DHS Component Tree]] - [[Butler Assassination Attempt]] · [[White House Press Ban]] · [[Timothy Kelly]] - [[Susie Wiles]] · [[Steven Cheung]] · [[CNN]] · [[MSNBC]] · [[Politico]]