Eleven Interesting Facts about the Secret Service

You might learn something new!

Issue #106 Fun Friday, August 12, 2022 (about 2.5. minutes reading time)

With the recent growing Secret Service scandal surrounding missing text messages from around the time of the January 6, 2021, insurrection, today is a good day to learn some interesting facts about that government agency.

In addition to protecting the First Family, the Secret Service also provides security for the vice president, the president-elect, the vice president-elect, former presidents and their families, presidential candidates, visiting heads of state, and representatives of the United States performing special missions overseas.

Award-winning journalist Hugo Lowell of The Guardian recently published an article disclosing that the Secret Service Inspector General’s office prepared a memo about the agency’s resistance to an overview after January 6, but the memo was ignored.

It’s unsettling to think that some of those who are assigned to protect important people around the world could be instead following their own anti-government and anti-democracy agenda, but with an organization so large, it is unfortunately inevitable.

Please be sure to read and act on the important information at the end of this post. Thank you!

1. 1865 The Secret Service was initially created as an investigative unit of the Department of the Treasury. During and after the Civil War, it is estimated that between 1/3 and 1/2 of the circulating currency was counterfeit. The Secret Service was created to address this problem.

2. 1867 The role of the agency is expanded to include investigating mail theft, bootlegging, smuggling, and other types of fraud.

3. 1902 After the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley, the Secret Service establishes a round-the-clock detail to protect President Theodore Roosevelt.

4. 1908 The Federal Bureau of Investigation is established, beginning with a group of investigators from the Secret Service and Department of Justice.

5. 1950 Leslie Coffelt is the first and only Secret Service agent to be killed in the line of duty. He was assigned to the protection of President Harry S. Truman at Blair House in Washington, D.C.

6. 1968 After Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated, the Secret Service is assigned to protect major presidential and vice presidential candidates.

7. 1995 Six Secret Service agency employees are killed when domestic terrorists bomb the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City. There was a regional Secret Service office in the building.

8. 2001 Secret Service Special Officer Craig Miller was killed when the Secret Service’s New York Field Office in the Twin Towers was destroyed during the terror attacks.

9. 2003 The Secret Service agency moves from the Treasury Department to the Department of Homeland Security, although it continues with its original mission to investigate financial crimes.

10. 2007 Because of the extreme racial uproar following Barack Obama’s announcement of his run for United States president, he and his family are immediately assigned Secret Service protection. Usually, Secret Service protection for presidential and vice presidential candidates does not start until those candidates are the official nominees of their respective political parties.

11. 2016 The Secret Service conducts the largest seizure of counterfeit currency in the agency’s history. Thirty million counterfeit US dollars and 50,000 euros are discovered in Lima, Peru. The task of investigating and seizing counterfeit currency was why the Secret Service was originally established.

What do you think about the Secret Service? Did you learn anything new from this article?

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