Pressure is building for Joe Biden to accept a Secret Service detail. I expect this will happen by April 1.
Biden has been reluctant to accept a protective detail until now, knowing it would increase his separation from voters and aggravate the media, which dislikes restrictive Secret Service sanitized bubbles around “protectees.” But the new context for protection was emphasized on Super Tuesday when two protesters stormed a stage while Biden addressed a rally in California.
That incident will guide the Department of Homeland Security and congressional leaders responsible for overseeing candidate protection back to Secret Service threat assessments. Namely, the assessment that Joe Biden is likely to face an increasingly diverse and intense threat spectrum as the Democratic National Convention approaches.
The first concern is that Tuesday’s protest has publicly advertised Biden’s lack of protective security to threat actors. Yes, Biden has a protection officer with him on the campaign trail. I’ve seen this man, who we saw responding to the first stage rusher on Tuesday, wearing a Secret Service star pin — although not a color-of-day pin issued to agents. So he may well be ex-Secret Service. Regardless, one person is not enough to protect a candidate. That’s a truth evinced by the second protester who stormed Biden’s stage while the star-pin individual was removing the first protester.
The fear now is that some terrorist, or mentally disturbed individual, will watch that protest video and think, “Ah, I can get close to Biden.” This would not be the case were Biden under Secret Service protection.
In that scenario, Biden’s agent-in-charge or shift supervisor, and those agents closest to him, would have put themselves between Biden and the crowd. They would have formed a 360-degree circle around Biden as other agents and uniformed officers surrounded the stage to prevent other stage rushers. This tactic reflects the fact that agents are taught that apparently nonlethal threats might actually be diversions designed to allow an assassin to enter attack range. Good examples are seen by what happened when stage rushers sought out Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders back in 2016.
But note that in both cases, the campaign rallies continued very soon after the incidents.
That reflects a little known strength of the Secret Service’s Dignitary Protective Division, which is responsible for candidate protection. Also the standing division responsible for protecting visiting foreign heads of state, it emphasizes balancing diplomacy to protection. As with Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Washington in April 2018. In short, its agents are told to be more flexible with protectee demands than is the case with agents assigned to the Presidential Protective Division — which has a first responsibility to ensure the survivable presidency (a potentially national-existential issue).
Another factor here is that the Democratic primary race is heating up in emotion.
Some Sanders supporters now believe Biden has orchestrated an illegitimate conspiracy against their favored candidate. Just search for some variation of “Biden steal nomination” on Twitter and you’ll see what I mean. With Sanders likely to now escalate his rhetoric against Biden in order to undermine his remaining rival (a perfectly legitimate campaign strategy in any democracy!), antagonism towards the former vice president will grow further.
True, the overwhelming majority of Sanders supporters will not resort to violence or even disruptive protests. Yet the Secret Service must assess candidate protection with a view not to the majority, but to the margin of threat. That is to say, with a view to those few who wish to harm politicians, and how competently they can deliver their threat. And the broader rhetoric and ferocity of a campaign plays into these assessments.
Of course, Biden must accept a detail of his own volition. Will he? I suspect so. Where Biden’s lagging poll numbers and performance once incentivized his being able to campaign as freely as possible, Biden is now back in pole position. Security concerns now carry less political baggage. Expect him to accept a full-time Secret Service detail by the end of April. Sanders, for many of the previous reasons, might also do the same.
