Former Secret Service Agent Talks Trump's Relationship with Media | TMZ

Charles and I have been talking about it this morning, and it just seems shocking that these reporters and the White House staff would be in harm's way, and they would have no idea. Yeah, trouble in a relationship is an understatement, right? No transparency is also an understatement, but it speaks volumes about what the White House spokespeople think about the members of the media, specifically those that were on board that plane. If they couldn't even trust them with this type of information about, hey, we're going to bring them out the back and we're going to switch planes up because we're worried about the Iranians who are only 100 miles away from where we are at the moment, shooting down the plane, right? Given all the leaks, particularly with regard to this plane, what happened with former Secretary Frank Kendall last week, having his clearance revoked when it came to light that he did leak information about the ACM capabilities of the plane, I can see why the White House would be a little hesitant to clue the press in over concerns about a leak. But they could have just faked a mechanical problem where the plane wouldn't have taken off until Trump landed in the UK, and then he surfaces, and they realize he's not on Air Force One. And then the transparency happens. That's right. And they reveal, but why- You're- Yeah. Listen, any number of ways this could have played out, and I personally have been in situations where we've played this out, one of which was in India with President Clinton, another one was with President Bush in Iraq. We've had some similar situations occur with the Obamas, right? So this isn't the first time, and this didn't just happen haphazardly. This is part of the Secret Service high-threat-level contingency planning, right? And I find it difficult to believe that some thought didn't go into, hey, what are we gonna tell the members of the traveling press pool? Yet you come back with, we're not gonna tell them anything? I don't think that's an answer, and that's not a good way to go about doing business, especially with people you deal with every day. How high was this threat? This threat was as high as it can get, right? The Secret Service doesn't make it a point of their daily job to interfere with the president's schedule. So for them to go to the lengths of taking the president off of the plane, putting him into some catering truck, for lack of a better term, right? I guess that's what we're calling it, and putting me on an unmarked plane to fly him around and use Air Force One as a decoy, I don't think the threat could get much higher. There had to be some concrete, hard intel about an inbound threat, potentially with some sort of missile or rocket-fired device that had the capability of taking down the plane to take him off of it. Wow, yeah. It is, I can't explain to you how big of a deal it is for a government employee, and yeah, I've got a nice title of Secret Service agent, still a government employee, yet I'm going to go to the president of the United States and tell him we've got to take you off of the most secure aircraft in the world, put you in the back of an unarmored catering truck, put you on another plane, in this case it was a 757, unmarked, because I can't assure your safety and the safety of Air Force One once it's airborne. That is a huge decision that had to be made. Rich, in that situation that you just laid out, is it reasonable to expect the president, who has the final call, right, to say to his Secret Service detail, what about the people on the plane? Obviously the first concern is the president's safety. Is it reasonable to expect that a president in that situation might at least ask questions about, hey, what about the folks on that plane? Not only is it reasonable, but I know that that question had to have been asked, right? I've been in a situation before where we've had this exact discussion with different presidents, and that question always comes up. Well, what about the people on the plane? What about the people on the ground? What about the spectators? So you've got to be prepared to handle that. So the conversation that ensued with the president wasn't just with the Secret Service, but certainly with the senior-most White House spokesperson that happened to be on the ground.