I’ve covered three events involving U.S. presidents – one at the White House, two here locally – and the level of security that we had to go through for those events makes it hard for me to understand how a guy was able to check into a hotel that was hosting a presidential event with a shotgun, a handgun and knives, and get within hailing distance of not only the POTUS, but also the VP and the Cabinet.
What happened last night at the White House Correspondents Association dinner could have become an international incident, given the inexplicably dumb decision of the Secret Service to have the entire line of succession in a single location.
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The events that I was part of had nowhere near those stakes.
The first was a quick jaunt to Wintergreen Resort in Nelson County by Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1998, and, mind you, we local-media types didn’t get anywhere near Wintergreen or Clinton/Gore that day.
We were penned into an area in a field to watch the president and vice president disembark from their respective helicopters, wave in our general direction, and then get into SUVs to head up the mountain.
We were a football field away as all of that was going on.
To be able to secure this not-exactly-prime vantagepoint, we had to submit our names to the Secret Service for the requisite background checks that would ensure we weren’t assassination-minded whackos.
And then, upon reaching the security checkpoint, we had to have everything scanned, x-rayed, searched, we were questioned about our activities.
All to stand in a field and watch guys get out of two helicopters, get into their SUVs, then return several hours later to get out of their SUVs and get back into their helicopters.
The second event was at Reddish Knob, on the border of Augusta County, Rockingham County and West Virginia, in 1999, which Clinton used as the backdrop for an environmental policy announcement.
Same process in terms of background checks, with the addendum upon getting to the scene that the Secret Service was able to set up its checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain, with several layers of security to go through to get to the parking area where the shuttles would get us up to the top.
I was able to get within maybe 100 feet of the president this time.
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My final Secret Service experience was in 2002, when a local tee-ball team was invited to the White House for a game on the South Lawn.
Background checks ahead of time, as before, and then, I still almost didn’t get in.
I got there 10 minutes early, and as I was checking in at the security checkpoint outside the White House, the officer told me that I wasn’t authorized – turns out, it was because your authorization to enter is only good for a set time, and once the 10 minutes passed, I was good to go.
Once inside the gates, we were guided to an area at the foul pole down the left-field line, several hundred feet from where George W. Bush and the dignitaries were to be seated in bleachers.
Behind us was a wooded area, and I noticed one of the trees moving – it was a Secret Service agent, disguised as brush.
In the third inning, another agent, not in disguise, came over to me to remind me to make sure that my credential, which had fallen behind my tie, was visible to the snipers on the roof, with the message: “If they can’t see your credential, they don’t know that you’re supposed to be here.”
Message received.
It’s unfathomable to me, given those experiences, that a guy was able to check into a hotel about to host a presidential visit with a small arsenal of weapons.
I did everything but undergo a body-cavity search, and I wasn’t going to be anywhere near anybody important.
They’re lucky this guy didn’t just booby-trap his room with explosives and take the whole block down, with the entirety of the line of succession on the premises.
If last night’s guy was less video game developer and more John Rambo, we wake up today with a constitutional crisis, if not full-blown civil war.
This is now the third time that the Secret Service has flubbed big time at doing even the basics to keep a guy with a gun and ill intent from getting close to Donald Trump.
They x-rayed my reporter notebook in 1998, y’all.
The math ain’t mathing here.
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Chris Graham
