The Secret Service Texting Scandal Makes No Sense
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Personal protection is NOT about monitoring or policing the behavior of your protectee, NOT about inserting yourself into his personal business, job, or politics, and NOT about keeping records of his actions. If your protectee feels a need to ditch his protection detail because they might disapprove of, or blabber about, his behavior - then your protection service has failed.
If you task the Secret Service with monitoring Presidential behavior - don't be surprised when the monitoring logs are full of "President ordered us out of the room", "President wrote something on paper and showed it to Mr. X" etc. Or when the President twists arms, to replace professional Agents on his detail with tight-lipped political loyalists.
And if you want the Secret Service to act as a Praetorian Guard, getting involved in decisions about who gets to be President...start reading about how well that setup worked back in the Roman Empire. And again don't be surprised if Presidents start packing the Secret Service with hand-picked loyalists.
(Disclaimer: I have friends and/or relatives who where on Secret Service protection details back in the 90's and 00's. They have said nothing whatever concerning events of the past few years. All opinions are my own. Etc.)
There’s nothing here related to policing presidential behavior or decisions about who gets to be president. There’s executive & congressional branch oversight over the secret service. They received a lawful order to preserve data and then blasted it away. There’s a ton of moral hazard in that kind of brazen rule-breaking and you’ll likely see it reflected in the coming months/years.
> From 2005 to 2009 he was the deputy assistant secretary for policy of the Department of Homeland Security, overseeing the U.S. Secret Service.
Yet he writes the article as if he had zero insight into the Secret Service. Zero knowledge of their org chart, zero knowledge of their data retention policies, zero... The only card he shows is a very idealistic letter-of-the-law notion of how it should operate.
I could theorize about why that is... Plausible theories do not seem flattering to Mr. Rosenzweig, nor The Atlantic, nor readers of The Atlantic.
> There’s nothing here related to policing presidential behavior or decisions about...
No, nothing "policing" at all, about turning over detailed records on the rather clear commission of Sedition by a sitting Republican President, to a Democrat-controlled investigation. No chance that such records might help determine who wins the 2024 Presidential election. And no chance at all that a future Republican President and/or Congress would ever do anything to punish career employees of the Secret Service, if such records were turned over.
Both senders and recipients must be charged with violation of the presidential records act because it is unreasonable for both parties to delete a text without some explicit reason and given their roles they can't claim ignorance of such a law. This is a conspiracy. DHS taking over the investigation says a lot. I can't believe biden has done such a bad job at weeding out trump appointees. Even the justice department trump appointee is now prosecuting biden's son right before election season(who cares if he is guilty but this screams malicious prosecution).
I care if it's prosecuting for illegal Burisma Holdings activities.
I don't care if it's for his penchant for drugs & strippers.
Many millions of people communicate with apps which delete texts as one of its key features (i.e. Snapchat, Signal etc.). So yes.
I actually don't know anybody who uses Signal and doesn't use that feature.
GW had one, and his Admin said he was going to be murdered shortly before his private plane crashed.
Nothing new here. Politics, as usual.
See how narrow your focus is? It's not your fault, we're all served Kool-Aid every day. YOU may choose to drink it or not.
It's not pay walled, per se. PACER is free up to a number of requests. If you don't have an account, make one. If you don't want to put forth that effort, then you are most certainly arguing in partisan and uninformed bad faith. I was going to link a free copy, before I realized the aforementioned bait.