No, they’re a legally mandated benefit provided to ex-presidents. The Former Presidents Act guarantees lifetime Secret Service protection, with the only exception being if the president was removed from office. Trump can reject the protection, but the law says he has to be given the option. The law, of course, could be changed, but…
That seems incredibly reasonable… and had Trump been removed from office, it apparently would have been true, but absurdly, there’s no provision for it after he’s left office. What I’ve read explicitly says they can no more deny him Secret Service protection than they can just decide to stop paying his pension. The law seems to be based on the assumption that if a president did something egregious while in office, they’d be removed, so that’s the only exception. Trump just keeps breaking the assumptions upon which the laws are premised…
Seems to me some things should be codified into law, in regards to the behavior of anyone who is elected president, rather than just making assumptions based upon someone’s idea of decorum.
Yeah, this seems like (one of the many, many) laws that need to be amended to take Trump (or someone like him) into consideration. Trump keeps revealing all the weak spots, all the assumptions that can’t be made. But unfortunately at this point, the law is what it is and would have to be changed to deny Trump lifelong Secret Service protection.
(Although Trump can reject it - and get paid something like a million dollars a year instead, ostensibly to hire his own guards. If he ends up in some sort of VIP prison where the prison itself is protecting him, I could see him doing that.)
One assumes to prevent him from being kidnapped too.
But, either way, all of those tasks are made significantly easier if he is confined to one controlled location and not allowed to interact with the general public (or even less people).
How much budget would the Secret Service save if all his travel and all public appearances are eliminated?
What gets me is how people bend over backwards to defend T****’s “rights” under the law, real or imagined, when he and his cronies (including the current SCOTUS) consistently ignore the very real legal rights of others.
The law (both Federal and military) protects whistleblowers, yet both Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny were retaliated upon by T**** with no legal repurcussions.
No, it does say that he gets to have Secret Service protection even if he should end up in jail. This (among other things) is causing people in the criminal justice system to feel like it’s not tenable to put him in prison, unfortunately.
Well, they protect him from harm, and they have to be in the position to do that. (I.e. in the incredibly unlikely event he was put in a normal prison, in the general population, they’d have to be allowed to be physically near him, to protect him from everyone else there. Which, granted, would be hilarious. More realistically, of course, in that situation they’d just stick him in some separate area where that wasn’t an issue. Being in prison would actually make the Secret Service’s job easier.)
By changing the law, absolutely. (Though how likely is that, especially given the current make up of Congress?) It can’t be “taken away” by someone just arbitrarily deciding to remove his Secret Service protection, however, whatever Trump does. (Which is just as well, as otherwise Republicans would weaponize that.)
Yeeeeeepppp. They’ve been fixing some of the holes that Trump revealed in the system, but boy oh boy is there a lot of work left to be done. And Trump, even out of power, keeps revealing previously unrecognized weaknesses. (I’m suddenly thinking of him as the “accidental pen test president.” Hopefully that’s how he’ll go down in history, rather than the guy who revealed the weaknesses that subsequent presidents exploited…)
Eh. I really think that, while there are some real logistical hurdles that should hold us back from unwrapping the foil on the champagne just yet (Popehat’s podcast on the Georgia indictment was definitely a downer), I think this secret service angle is pretty irrelevant. There are a dozen ways that the secret service can still “protect” an ex-president while in jail. They could be invited to monitor prison security. They could deputize some of the guards to become limited secret service members. Etc. I don’t think the justice department or the courts are really concerning themselves too much about that at this point.
Talk about that all-poweful, unstoppable “Kraken” lawsuit was funny too. Because the Kraken always wins in the end and never just falls to pieces in the most public way possible, right?
They could put a chair in front of the cell, have a Secret Service officer sit in it. A chair, in front of door, in a hallway that virtually nobody ever walks down. When the person comes to drop off meals, they can make sure that person doesn’t harm TFG.
This should be the least risky and easiest protection job ever. Boredom is likely the largest risk.
I agree this is a complete non issue as far as prosecuting him goes.
The crimes, and proving them to a jury in sufficient detail vs the statutory language. That’s where any possible problem exists. The Justice department seems to have a good handle on this.
The guy who committed the crimes would like you to believe that punishing him is so exceedingly complex that there’s no reason to even try. To just ignore those crimes. Focus on how hard the punishment would be instead.
