President Joe Biden doesn’t trust his Secret Service detail because some of them are “MAGA sympathizers,” according to a new book purporting to give an inside look at his administration.
The agency charged with protecting U.S. leaders is “full of white ex-cops from the South who tend to be deeply conservative,” Chris Whipple wrote in his upcoming book, “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,” according to The Hill.
That led Biden to have some “discomfort with his Secret Service detail; some of them were MAGA sympathizers. He didn’t trust them,” Whipple wrote.
“Surrounded by a new phalanx of strangers, Biden couldn’t help but wonder, Do these people really want me here?” Whipple wrote in the book, set to be released Jan. 17.
The Secret Service provides round-the-clock security to the president and vice president, who have dedicated agents assigned to them. The usually quiet agency has recently been embroiled in political scandals surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol storming and efforts to overturn Biden’s election.
A month prior, an agent assigned to then-President Donald Trump had made an unprecedented leap nearly to the top of his personal staff. And the agency later claimed to have deleted all messages agents sent on Jan. 6 when investigators came looking for them.
Carol Leonnig, a Washington Post reporter who wrote a book about the Secret Service, said in June that a “very large contingent” of Trump’s detail “were personally cheering for Biden to fail.”
Biden in August appointed a new director of the Secret Service, Kim Cheatle. She has Biden’s “complete trust” and served on his vice presidential security detail, according to his announcement.
In his new book, Whipple also claims that Biden “wasn’t buying the details” of a report that his family dog, Major, bit a Secret Service agent. The White House downplayed the bite at the time while subsequent reports suggested more incidents were being covered up, as reported by the New York Post.
But Biden told a friend that Secret Service agents never go where the bite reportedly happened, according to Whipple’s book.
“Somebody was lying, Biden thought, about the way the incident had gone down,” Whipple wrote.
