RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from The Independent — the article as it was filed.
‘You've got to be creative. You've got to be nimble. You've got to make things happen,’ says former Secret Service agent Bobby McDonald
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Security experts are defending last month's controversial Air Force One decoy flight — while also noting that it's just the latest ruse to protect an American president from harm.
An Iranian assassination threat led President Donald Trump to be sneaked off Air Force One in a catering container and flown to the U.K. in a military jet following the recent Nato summit in Turkey, The Washington Post reported Monday.
Journalists and some White House staffers made the July 8 trip on the presidential plane without knowing Trump was no longer aboard, according to the Post .
Former Secret Service agent Bobby McDonald told The Independent that the "threat level" against Trump was "very high, and has been high for a while."
“It's been a very long two years of both domestic — and now international — potential assassination attempts ,” McDonald said Tuesday. “You've got to be creative. You've got to be nimble. You've got to make things happen.”
McDonald, now an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at New Haven University, said the Secret Service has a long history of using “dummy motorcades” and other techniques to conceal the movements of American presidents.
Former Secret Service agent Bill Gage, who led the agency's elite Counter Assault Team, also told The Independent that the details of presidential travel can be kept so hush-hush that he once got chewed out by a supervisor for leaving CAT members at the White House after President Barack Obama secretly left on a 2009 trip to Iraq.
“I had to ask him, what are you even talking about? And he's like, didn't you see the news? Obama wasn't even here,” Gage recalled. “And I had to convince him that I didn't know.”
Gage, now director of executive protection at the SafeHaven Security Group, also said he stood guard at President George W. Bush's Texas ranch in 2003 without knowing that Bush had been whisked off under cover of darkness to celebrate Thanksgiving with U.S. troops in Iraq.
“The amount of people that know in the Secret Service when they do these fake-outs is so limited,” he said. ”You're probably talking the president, maybe one or two of his closest advisers and probably the director of the Secret Service and the SAC [special agent in charge] of the detail.”
The journalists who boarded Air Force One in Ankara, Turkey, were instructed to lower the plane's window shades, with Trump later telling them , “Because you’re probably on a dangerous flight.”
The former Secret Service agents differed on the likely reason why the shades were ordered pulled down.
“You want to hide the ability for anyone to see that there's a plane going overhead,” McDonald said. “The Iranians, from the reports, don't have much radar, don't have much of an air force. So, allowing light to come out of the plane makes it — potentially makes it visible, and makes it a target.”
Gage, however, called the move “kind of a silly precaution” to prevent anyone from looking out and wondering why a loading truck was pulling up alongside the plane.
"I don't want to speculate because I'm not an air safety specialist, but I would say it was just so that they couldn't see anything that was going on," he said.
Whatever the motive, McDonald said he was confident there were “other assets that were up in the air” to protect Air Force One. He called moving Trump onto the military jet “just an added layer of a security apparatus that's put into place.”
“There's no way in the world there was no care and concern for those other people on that plane,” he said.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton used a similar maneuver to travel to Pakistan, where he arrived in an unmarked Grumman Gulfstream C-20 executive jet about 10 minutes after a similar plane labeled “USA” and painted red, white and blue had landed and departed, UPI reported at the time.
Trump traveled to Turkey on a newer model Air Force One that’s a retrofitted Boeing 747-8 gifted to him by Qatar, and he was initially advised to leave on an older one because the new plane lacked advanced anti-missile capabilities, The New York Times reported last month.
At the time, Trump claimed he was going to fly on the older plane “for old time’s sake,” and so U.S. troops in the U.K. and their families could tour the new Air Force One and check out its $400 million in upgrades.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called Monday for a congressional briefing on the matter.
“I want to know what precautions were taken to make sure that all of the passengers on that Air Force One, which was judged too dangerous for the president to fly on, what precautions were taken to keep the staff and reporters on that plane safe,” he told CNN .
Former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod also told CNN that it's “kind of stunning” that Air Force One passengers “were sort of a decoy there and were not told that the president wasn't on board, and that the deception was continued even after he safely returned to Washington.”
Ned Price, a former Department of State spokesperson during the Biden administration, said on social media that “subterfuge is sometimes a necessary safeguard” to protect a president.
“But misleading reporters in the moment and, worse yet, continuing to lie to the American people weeks later is never acceptable. As far as I know, it’s unique to this White House,” he wrote.
Other Trump critics were even more outspoken, with podcaster Tommy Vietor saying the incident “makes Trump look like both a liar and a scared little bitch.”
"The mental image of Trump hiding from Iran in a catering cart is devastating. A weak, stupid old man hiding from the consequences of his own decision while endangering others," the former Obama National Security Council staffer said on X.
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