Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

How stupid are these people?

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

The National Guard is not Batman.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

You are here: Home / Jan 6: Insurrection / Wednesday Evening Open Thread: The Secret Service Needs A Housecleaning

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: The Secret Service Needs A Housecleaning

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The SS spokesperson is currently arguing that, under the letter of the law, it was no business of theirs if some nutter wanted to assassinate Nancy Pelosi.

Perhaps all those emails disappeared because quips were passed about just such a possibility?


Speaker Pelosi’s hometown paper:

… The email says the Secret Service discovered a post on the social network Parler, a favorite of right-wing users, that threatened then-President-Elect Joe Biden, which said, “we CANNOT allow #Biden to enter the white house.”

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, confirmed that the email was authentic. He noted that Pelosi, D-San Francisco, is not a protectee of the Secret Service, which oversees security for the president. The messages were sent to Capitol police out of “an abundance of caution” even though they did not contain “a specific threat of violence to her on that evening,” he said.

The Secret Service flagged the account because it had posted a specific threat of harm to Biden. U.S. Capitol Police conduct their own surveillance of similar threats against members of Congress and were likely following the same information the Secret Service had, Guglielmi said…

The Secret Service email also lists other posts by the Parler account and a Twitter account linked to the same user, including a post on Jan. 3 that said: “We’re all on a mission to save America. Lone wolf attacks are the way to go. Stay anonymous. Stay alive. Guns up patriots!!”

Other posts listed in the email included violent threats against Biden, including one saying, “Biden will die shortly after being elected. Patriots are going to tear his head off.” Another post from Dec. 31 gave travel tips for people “GOING TO DC TO FORCE CONGRESS TO REFUSE BIDEN’S RIGGED ELECTION.”

Staffers in Pelosi’s office also did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment…


Optics: NOT GREAT, TONY!

Of course, people assume the worst — for reasons:

Reader Interactions

113Comments

  1. 1.

    cain

    These people are like ticks, burying themselves into the body politic and not letting go while sucking the blood out of it.

    ETA – really? MFs couldn’t give me #2?

  3. 3.

    WaterGirl

    The SS spokesperson is currently arguing that, under the letter of the law, it was no business of theirs if some nutter wanted to assassinate Nancy Pelosi.

    Good luck with that.  They need more than a housecleaning.  Everybody needs to get fired and then anyone who wants to can APPLY for a job.

  6. 6.

    Poe Larity

    They should have never been moved out of Treasury.

    But everyone wet their pantaloons after 9/11.

  7. 7.

    MinuteMan

    @Dangerman: Nowadays they recommend just pulling them out gently with a pair of tweezers.

     

    We should treat them like ticks. Cut off their oxygen or a flame in the ass.

  12. 12.

    NotMax

    Oh my.

    A Saudi woman has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for retweeting activists through her Twitter account and sharing posts that spoke in favor of the right of women to drive. Salma al-Shehab was a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds in the UK and was detained in January 2021 after returning to Saudi Arabia for a vacation.

    Shehab was initially sentenced to six years for using social media to “disturb public order and destabilize the security and stability of the state,” based on having reshared tweets from Saudi activists living in exile who called for the release of political prisoners in the kingdom.
    [snip]
    …prosecutors in the appeal to Shehab’s case argued for a more severe punishment under Saudi cybercrime and anti-terrorism laws, leading to a drastically increased sentence of 34 years, handed down on August 8th. The Freedom Initiative nonprofit, which advocates for the rights of prisoners detained in the Middle East, states that this is the longest known sentence for a women’s rights activist in Saudi Arabia. Source

  16. 16.

    David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Richard Nixon considered Ted Kennedy such a threat that he tried to catch him cheating on his wife, even ordering aides to plant secret service bodyguards to spy on the senator’s behaviour.

    “Do you have anybody in the secret service that you can get to?” the US president asked his aide John Ehrlichman in a stark series of Oval Office conversations about Kennedy before the 1972 election. “Yeah, yeah,” Ehrlichman replied.

    “Plant one,” Nixon said. “Plant two guys on him. This could be very useful.”
    Richard Nixon

    “Does [Teddy] do anything?” Nixon asked in a September 1971 meeting. “No, no, he’s very clean,” Ehrlichman replied. “He was in Hawaii on his own. He was staying in some guy’s villa. He was just as nice as could be the whole time.”

    Tricky Dick asked the Secret Service to become campaign spies and they had no problem.

  22. 22.

    Jackie

    TFG’s grift just keeps on grifting…

    “Former president Donald Trump bombarded his supporters with more than 100 emails asking for money based on the FBI’s search of his Florida Mar-a-Lago Club for classified materials last week. They paid off,” the Washington Post reports.

    “Contributions to Trump’s political action committee topped $1 million on at least two days after the Aug. 8 search, according to two people familiar with the figures. The daily hauls jumped from a level of $200,000 to $300,000 that had been typical in recent months.”

  27. 27.

    Urban Suburbanite

    So Port Townsend, this waterfront, tourist-y, artsy town in Washington, is big news in the TERFosphere. So this elderly nuisance decided it would be a great idea to follow around a trans kid working at the YMCA pool and scream about how she’s a pedophile out to rape children. And because she’s an elderly nuisance with a history of this behavior, she was banned for life. Which meant she had to go running to some of the more virulent Seattle-area conservative grifters and wail about her supposed victimhood. This was followed by some out of town bigots and fascist hangers-on (not the Proud Boy types, but the hateful older people who tend to show up in their periphery) tried to do some rally for spiteful twunts, but got told off by the town. There’s now a lot of weird British women waxing hysteric about how womanhood is under attack and Port Townsend is so scary (kitschy, sure. Scary? Helllllllll no).

  29. 29.

    Roger Moore

    @Poe Larity:

    They should have never been moved out of Treasury.

    Yep. DHS was a bad idea that turned out worse in practice.  The whole department should be broken up and the various agencies returned to other departments as appropriate.

  30. 30.

    mrmoshpotato

    @WaterGirl: If I remember correctly, the Trump trash that attacked the Capitol building seemed to know which windows weren’t reinforced.

  32. 32.

    pacem appellant

    @Jackie: My takeaway is that it means less money for real candidates.

    I dream of the GOP going down in flames this November. But it’s going to take a lot of work.

  35. 35.

    Mike S

    At least we won’t have to pay for the insignia change on their stationary if Trump gets back in office.

  36. 36.

    Ohio Mom

    @Roger Moore: “Yep. DHS was a bad idea that turned out worse in practice.”

    A bad idea that came out of a Republican administration. What a surprise.

  41. 41.

    SoCalKaren

    Is anyone in the White House paying attention to these things?  Secret Service traitors, Louis DeJoy continuing to fck up the USPS, the DHS Inspector General, etc. etc.  Why is nothing being done?

  48. 48.

    Spanky

    Grassley knew. I’d pay good money if they were to broadcast his auto da fe on pay per view.

  52. 52.

    Edmund Dantes

    As I said before, I think Major got a raw deal. Still think his SS biting incidents were provoked or he was just pointing out the evil ones.

  56. 56.

    StringOnAStick

    @SoCalKaren: I read somewhere that with Biden’s people officially on the board as of maybe two weeks ago (? unsure of the timing) DeJoy has been effectively sidelined.  His order for a bunch of gas guzzling vehicles was overturned and it’s back to ordering EV’s.  A Google of DeJoy and post office returns a link to a 8/2/2022 WaPo article that I think explains this, judging from the title.  I don’t have a sub so I can’t look to be sure.

  57. 57.

    narya

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: YAAAAYYYY!!!! Congrats!

    I, too, want to know about the panic buttons, and the windows, and the thugs who headed for offices about which they should not have known. I have thought since day one that there was inside help of some kind (perhaps many kinds). I also wish a SS agent who knew about the fuckery but wasn’t part of it had saved their texts.

  58. 58.

    H.E.Wolf

    Is anyone in the White House paying attention to these things? Why is nothing being done?

    Thanks to a long sojourn in TX in my youth, my response to this type of drive-by shit-stirring is a kindly-delivered Bless Your Heart, Honey Child. :-)

  59. 59.

    motopilot

    @Faithful Lurker: I live in Port Ludlow and was walking through Port Townsend on Monday afternoon.  Numerous police cars had Water Street blocked off from roughly Quincy to Taylor Streets and there were quite a few people hanging out in front of a building where the town council was meeting.  While being called a protest, it was mostly just a lot of people hanging out and talking.  Local P/T residents were acting like the whole thing is a farce.

  61. 61.

    A Man for All Seasonings (formerly Geeno)

    If I’m Joe Biden, I take the whole Secret Service – IG and all on an outing on AF1 to Guantanamo, leave them there, then declare them enemy combatants and tell the Marines to regard them as such and get whatever information they can.

  62. 62.

    Sasha

    The Secret Service went from a professional organization to a hotbed of right-wing goobery when it was moved from Treasury to Homeland Security.

  63. 63.

    catclub

    @WaterGirl: I would bet that NSA and some other Five Ears club member has all the texts.  They could probably only be extracted from NSA on a counterintelligence investigation.

  64. 64.

    Citizen Alan

    @cain:

    I remain convinced that, in private,  every single Republican in Washington DC popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate 9/11.  It all but guaranteed shrub’s reelection and gave the filthy Swine a license to attack the patriotism of every single Democrat who didn’t grovel before them

  67. 67.

    Kattails

    @MinuteMan: that’s so you don’t leave the head in, which can fester and continue to deliver whatever nasty disease the little shits are carrying.  You pull them out carefully and then torch them or just flush down the toilet.
    Actually it’s best not to let them get embedded in the first place. Just sayin’.

  68. 68.

    Sure Lurkalot

    New subpoena! Let’s goooooooooooooo!


    BrianKarem:     NOW: The DOJ has issued a sweeping grand jury subpoena to the National Archives for Trump White House documents including his daily schedule and phone logs preceding January 6.

  69. 69.

    Bill Arnold

    Mike Pence was reported as not trusting people in the Secret Service other than his own detail in July 2021:
    Mike Pence Refused to Get in Car With Secret Service During Capitol Riot: Book. (DARRAGH ROCHE, 7/16/21)

    Giebels and the rest of Pence’s detail guided them down a staircase to a secure subterranean area that rioters couldn’t reach, where the vice president’s armored limousine awaited. Giebels asked Pence to get in one of the vehicles. ‘We can hold here,’ he said.”
    Pence told Giebels: “I’m not getting in the car, Tim.”
    “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car,” he said.

    This, about Chuck Grassley opening the envelopes, because Pence would not be present, was reported Jan 5 2021:

    NEW: Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the Senate president pro tempore, says he and not Vice President Mike Pence will preside over the certification of Electoral College votes, since “we don’t expect him to be there.”
    — Roll Call (@rollcall) January 5, 2021

    Yeah, the Secret Service needs to clean house. With selective application of  Piranha Solution.  They have treasonous cells of Trump Cultists. (As does much of DHS.)
    (And if any such are reading this, fuck you, Enemies of the United States of America.)

  71. 71.

    Another Scott

    ICYMI, RewiringAmerica.org:

    YOUR SAVINGS CALCULATOR

    How much money will you get with the Inflation Reduction Act?

    Enter your household information to find out.

    […]

    (via SenSchumer)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  72. 72.

    Bill Arnold

    @SoCalKaren:

    Secret Service traitors, Louis DeJoy continuing to fck up the USPS, the DHS Inspector General, etc. etc. Why is nothing being done?

    Why do you presume that nothing is being done?

  75. 75.

    Leto

    Gollum J. Trump@realGollumTrump

    ALL THEY HADS TO DOES IS ASKS!! ASKS US!!! But didn’t they asks us precious? Didn’t they sends subpeanuts? Eh? QUIET! FALSE NEWSES!!! The better riddle, yes precious, is what bout Obamagorn- Its three wagons of scrolls! Will they sneaks in the night to takes what it tooks right?

    7:08 PM · Aug 16, 2022·Twitter for iPhone

  78. 78.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    The Secret Service has earned the reputation of being a professional organization dedicated to protecting the President and patriotic service; they’ve built up a mystique. With this shit, for TFG of all people, they’ve thrown all of that away. I wonder if they realize this or care. I would hope they would

  79. 79.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Bill Arnold: Because the vermin of the Village don’t report on boring, MEGO stuff like that.  They’re more into palace intrigue, gossip, and gotcha questions.

  83. 83.

    Urban Suburbanite

    @NotoriousJRT: Oh hell no. Wife and I went up there a couple years ago for a weekend trip. It’s a pretty area, which makes the handwringing from weird British people even more absurd.

  85. 85.

    Bonnie

    I think Biden needs to take a page from Reagan’s book on the Presidency and fire the entire Secret Service.  Hire some people who want to work for him.

  86. 86.

    Scout211

    Trump is “considering” releasing the CCTV footage of the FBI executing the search warrant at MAL. Link

    Yes. I think they would be just awesome. Feel free to show all the boxes, all the documents, Trump.  I’m sure that footage will make you look so very innocent. So go ahead.  We’ll be waiting.

    Washington (CNN)Some allies of former President Donald Trump are urging him to publicly release surveillance footage of FBI agents executing a search warrant on his Mar-a-Lago residence, a proposal that has drawn mixed reaction inside his orbit, CNN has learned.
    The CCTV footage has been so closely held that aides to the former President aren’t sure if he has seen it in full himself, said a person close to Trump.
    ”I don’t think it’s been shared by anyone outside of the attorneys,” this person said.

  88. 88.

    Another Scott

    @Scout211: I assume the MAGAts intent would be to encourage doxing and threatening the various law enforcement agents on the scene who are on the tapes (if the tapes exist).

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  90. 90.

    MisterDancer

    @Bonnie: I think Biden needs to take a page from Reagan’s book on the Presidency and fire the entire Secret Service.

    Firing the air traffic controllers was,  as I understand it,  a major issue that took years to recover from.

    Getting rid of the entire Secret Service at one go,  might just be worse.

    The Service isn’t just protecting POTUS and other key people. It’s original role as the protector of America’s financial systems still stands, and is critical. (Note that the heroes in the WILD WILD WEST show and movie are Secret Service.)

    Even outside of that, the planning and training it takes to manage all the very specific and complex protection protocols for POTUS and related folx are deep, y’all. As I was just learning a few days ago, the Service learned a lot of hard lessons from the horrors of the JFK shooting and its aftermath of snap decisions and poor planning.

    This is not a duty you can pass to other services on the fly. Unwinding this issue without putting Biden and others at real risk will be complex and messy and mostly done outside our awareness, as it should be.

  92. 92.

    WaterGirl

    @MisterDancer: Biden won’t do anything big with the Secret Service until after November.

    Shortly after November, he will take some action.  That’s my prediction, anyway.  That’s my wild ass guess.

    *edited for accuracy!

  97. 97.

    sdhays

    @Scout211:

    …aides to the former President aren’t sure if he has seen it in full himself, said a person close to Trump.

    LOL. Sure, Donnie Dumpy definitely has the attention span to watch video tape of people moving boxes and shuffling paper for hours. The reason he hasn’t seen the footage is totally because it’s so “closely held”.

    If they claimed he had “seen it”, there’s no way he “saw” more than a couple clips before he threw his ketchup-drenched lunch plate at the wall and climbed onto his desk for a rage-nap (to the tune of “Memory”).

  99. 99.

    Another Scott

    @MisterDancer: +1

    Something something clear, simple, and wrong.

    2021 Annual Report (35 page .pdf)

    THE SECRET SERVICE PROVIDES PHYSICAL PROTECTION for the President and Vice President of the United States; their families; presidential and vice presidential candidates; former Presidents and First Ladies; several high-level Administration officials; visiting foreign dignitaries; and designated National Special Security Events (NSSEs). With fewer than 8,000 personnel in FY 2021, the Secret Service conducted protectee visits for over 5,778 domestic travel locations, and 246 international travel destinations from Guatemala to Switzerland.

    This high operational tempo continued throughout the global pandemic, and to the conclusion of the 2020 presidential campaign. The Secret Service rapidly and successfully established a protective division for a former President. During the Presidential transition, the Secret Service covered 43 permanent (16 temporary) protectees, a historically high number for the agency. In overcoming the added complexity, unmet funding requirements, and enhanced staffing needs of this historic 2020 Presidential transition, the Secret Service further signified its resilience and relentless dedication to the protective mission.

    […]

    We need the Secret Service.  If management has been politicized, then that can and must be fixed.  If its mission is too big for its 8000 employees, then we need to spend the money to do what’s necessary so that it can perform its mission.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  100. 100.

    MisterDancer

    @Felanius Kootea: Again, see above Nixon reference.

    This is the same mindset, in many ways, that gets you cops that gun Black folx down, AND the vast majority of cops who say jack shit when that happens, for whatever reason.

    People been saying for a damned long time that Law Enforcement in America is broken as fuck. Secret Service doing the bidding of Conservatives — in the 1970s, or today — is just one part of that.

    You ain’t fixing that by moving them back under Treasury. There are ways to “patch” it — they did fine for Obama! — but I suspect the rot is very deep,indeed.

  101. 101.

    MisterDancer

    @WaterGirl: That’s a fair guess. I confess that Biden already knew, from the Obama years, some of the issues and has people working to mitigate risks.

    It’s just that work is almost certainly compartmentalized, and for obvious reasons!

  102. 102.

    Karen

    Grassley needs to be subpoenaed by the 1/6 committee because it sounds like he planned on Pence being gone so he’d have to be election certifier.

  105. 105.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Urban Suburbanite: Worth noting that back in the day, Port Townsend was home to an annual trans convention  — not sure if it’s still running — which was one of the few places many closeted trans people felt comfortable venturing out in public, often for the first time in their lives.

    Aside from the locals being friendly — if for no other reason those sweet, sweet tourism dollars — the convention was located there because the out of the way location eased fears about being accidentally seen and outed.

  107. 107.

    jonas

    @HumboldtBlue: ​
      I watched that and was like “wut?”

    Walker is the epitome of the MAGA troll candidate. The MAGAts only support him because they know that such an untfit, unqualified person running for Senate makes liberals upset, who, you know, care about the country and want reasonable people running it. It’s like they’re all Ursa in Superman II, spitting with derision: “He actually cares for these Earth people?!”

  108. 108.

    Another Scott

    @jonas:

    FTFNYT from May 1972:

    WASHINGTON, May 15 —Shortly after Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama was shot today, President Nixon ordered Secret Service protection for Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Representative Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn and Representative Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas.

    Senator Kennedy, who has declared repeatedly that he is not a candidate for President, accepted the offer, and an un specified number of agents were guarding his home tonight in nearby McLean, Va. Agents joined Mrs. Chisholm in Detroit, where she was staying on her way from Akron, Ohio, to San Francisco by plane. Agents were also sent to the, Washington home of Mr. Mills.

    Eugene T. Rossides, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for enforcement and operations, said tonight, when asked if there was fear of a conspiracy against the candidates:

    “No. That is just one of the items being investigated, It is just prudence on our part to add, protection to the other candidates, particularly Senator Kennedy.”

    […]

    (It’s not clear to me where exactly this fits in the spying timeline of “before the 1972 election”.)

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  110. 110.

    wenchacha

    @NotoriousJRT: My millennial offspring are a little salty about “rich hippies” retiring in PT! My daughter went there on a whim, and stayed, but had very little money in the beginning.

    She now works in a boat yard, lives in a camper. Not down by the river.

  113. 113.

    Paul in KY

    @Citizen Alan: Those PNAC traitors wished for something like that. I think Cheney and maybe Batshit McChimpy knew what was going to happen & let it so they could do all their evil stuff. Shrub was heading to a re-election loss before 911.

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