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Some other Secret Service tidbits:
Based on exclusive interviews with more than 100 current and former Secret Service agents, IN THE PRESIDENT’S SECRET SERVICE reveals:
• Since Barack Obama took office, threats against the president are up 400 percent from about 3,000 threats a year against President Bush.
• Because the Secret Service has been cutting corners since its absorption by the Homeland Security Department, when Vice President Joe Biden threw the first pitch at the first Baltimore Orioles game of the 2009 season, the Secret Service did not screen any of the more than 40,000 fans, stunning agents on his detail and the agency’s Baltimore field office. Contrary to Biden’s claims, he compromised the location of a secret underground bunker built to protect the vice president.
• When he was President George Bush’s Treasury secretary, John Snow traveled to his hometown of Richmond almost every weekend and saw a woman agents believed was his mistress, incurring huge expenses for taxpayers because the Secret Service had to accompany him.
• Vice President Spiro Agnew, a champion of family values, had extramarital affairs while in office.
• George W. Bush’s daughters, Barbara Bush and Jenna Bush Hager, gave their Secret Service details a hard time and would try to lose their agents.
• Based on a psychic’s vision that a sniper would assassinate President George H.W. Bush when he arrived in Enid, Oklahoma, to give a speech, the Secret Service changed his motorcade route.
