Zero Fail, page 32
As Obama outperformed expectations in his campaign in the spring of 2008, the chatter on white supremacist websites rose sharply. Obama’s staff was taken aback by a few threats that junior aides flagged.
On February 15, 2008, an anonymous poster on a white power blog wrote, “The KKK or someone WILL assassinate Obama! If we get a NIGGER President all you NIGGERs [sic] will think you’ve won and that the WHITE people will have to bow to you. FUCK THAT. Obama will die, KKK forever.”
On April 22, while Clinton and Obama were still duking it out for the nomination, one anonymous writer promised his online friends that “IF OBAMA BECOMES PRESEDANT [sic] I WILL KILL HIM MYSELF MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT.”
These sparks of racist hatred toward Obama flared with alarming frequency, but they also mirrored a long-simmering racism inside the Secret Service, one that was starting to spill out into the public eye. The guards who would protect the most threatened candidate in history had their own hidden history of mistreating and ridiculing Black people in their midst. The Service might have a national, elite profile, but just like a small-town police department, it employed rank-and-file agents and senior leaders who felt they could make racist jokes—or worse.
In April 2008, a Black Secret Service officer found a noose hanging in the Service’s training facility in Beltsville in a room used by one of the center’s Black instructors. The Black officer didn’t call his boss, for fear the incident would be covered up. Instead he alerted a high-ranking Black supervisor at headquarters. Investigators found the white agent, who disputed that it was a noose. But when the news leaked to the press, Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service, insisted that the agent be put on leave pending an investigation. Whether the noose was intentional or not, the Service chalked it up to one bad apple, not to the existence of a larger problem.
But on May 10, 2008, The New York Times published a story that made Sullivan and the rest of his leadership team gathered in their offices on the eighth floor of Secret Service headquarters cringe. It described how twenty supervisors, some of them at headquarters, had traded racially insensitive jokes and racist commentary in internal emails. One joke mentioned the good that would come from Jesse Jackson being killed by a missile hitting the plane in which he was traveling. Another was titled “Harlem Spelling Bee,” ridiculing Black students as having poor English. A few of the sample spelling bee words were mockingly defined as follows:
“Income: I just got in bed wif da ho and income my wife.”
“Undermine: There’s a fine lookin hoe in the apartment undermine.”
This seamy culture at the top of the Secret Service was revealed thanks to an eight-year-old racial discrimination lawsuit filed by Black agents back in 2000, one that the Secret Service had been trying to quash since it was filed. Led by presidential detail agent Ray Moore, the Black agents had claimed a racist culture had blocked and stalled their ability to rise in the organization. The senior leadership of the Service made promotion decisions informally and kept no official files documenting them. Moore couldn’t take another year of being passed over for white agents who rated below him and others he had trained. He and his colleagues risked career suicide when they filed suit, seeking to find out whether race played a role in supervisors’ pattern of elevating whites so much more frequently. In 2004, a judge had ordered the Service to provide supervisors’ internal emails. But by late 2007, the Service was still dragging its heels, claiming it would take years more for the overburdened agency to gather the material.
In a three-day court hearing on the case in late 2007, federal magistrate Deborah Robinson said she was out of patience and rebuked the Service for its stonewalling. She gave them a do-or-die deadline and the threat of daily fines afterward: Turn over all electronic messages among supervisors within three months, or else. The Service hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to review 20 million electronic records on promotions and race, and ended up discovering more warts than it bargained for. In their private chats on email, some of the Service’s highest supervisors had traded racist jokes about Black men’s genitalia, the illiteracy of Black adults, and the sexual prowess of different races. With the agency already being questioned about the noose found at the training center, Sullivan decided the Service had to turn over the records mentioning race to the plaintiffs.
Two weeks later, a small slice of those emails leaked out in The New York Times. The centerpiece was the email about the “Harlem Spelling Bee” that then assistant director Thomas Grupski had shared with some other agents. The morning the story ran, aides to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called Sullivan to ask him what he was doing to handle this mess. Sullivan decided he would put Grupski on administrative leave. “We are deeply disappointed by any communication or action on the part of our employees that exhibits racial or other insensitivity,” Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren told the Times.
But when another batch of emails surfaced in the news five days later, this time involving some of Sullivan’s favored lieutenants, the Service reacted with anger rather than remorse. Two high-ranking leaders were implicated, including the Hispanic agent Victor Erevia, one of three detail leaders for Barack Obama. He had shared a single joke with two colleagues about how to cajole a woman into sex that stereotyped the sexual traits of Jewish, Southern, and Native American men. David O’Connor, a top supervisor overseeing all protection details and a close ally of Sullivan’s, was also implicated. He had received a string of racist jokes and rants from his brother, a retired agent, about Al Sharpton and how favoritism toward Black people was “ruining virtually every aspect of American life.” O’Connor replied that he would like to pass the joke along to a retired agent who was “worthy of trust and confidence.” In a public statement, Zahren said these emails should be read in context, simply as jokes. He said the disclosure of email traffic was a “deliberate attempt to embarrass the agency” during “an unprecedented presidential campaign.”
Receiving a racist joke in an email proved little about the receiver. Sending one, though, created a public relations problem. The Service temporarily transferred Erevia, who would later help lead the first major Black candidate’s campaign detail, and promoted him to a senior position over the agency’s technical security division. It isn’t clear whether Obama ever asked Erevia to explain.
Meanwhile, in June 2008, Hillary Clinton officially ended her campaign, leaving Obama as the Democratic nominee. Almost immediately, the racist reaction to an African American contender advanced from Internet vitriol to real plots with real guns. Four times before he was even sworn into office, white supremacists, militiamen, and mentally unhinged loners hatched plots to kill Obama—a steady stream of venom the Secret Service had never seen for a nominee.
One of the most worrisome schemes unfolded at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in late August 2008. Obama chose to accept his party’s nomination at Invesco Field, home of the Denver Broncos. An advance team worked in Denver for months to orchestrate a security plan for the convention, and that weekend, phalanxes of agents and officers poured into Denver to begin putting that plan into action. The four-day convention would begin Monday, August 25.
Late that Saturday night, three men and their girlfriends were smoking meth in a Hyatt Regency south of downtown. High on a mixture of methamphetamines and booze, they partied and talked about how to kill Obama, according to an informant. “No nigger should ever live in the White House,” said the group’s unofficial leader, Shawn R. Adolf.
Adolf, his cousin Tharin Gartrell, and his friend Nathan Johnson had traveled from neighboring towns into Denver on the eve of the convention. They mistakenly believed Obama was staying in their hotel. Perhaps they could find him and shoot him there, they mused aloud. Adolf’s girlfriend suggested one idea: They could put a gun inside a camera and shoot him while appearing to take pictures. Adolf suggested they kill Obama with a high-powered rifle from an elevated location, like the “shooting on a grassy knoll” that killed Kennedy.
Adolf, who claimed to be a member of the white nationalist group Sons of Silence, said he had less to lose because he was facing several felony warrants for robberies and gun charges. “I might as well kill him,” Adolf told them.
After midnight, Gartrell wanted to get some cigarettes. Adolf handed him the keys to his rented blue Dodge truck. An Aurora police officer noticed Gartrell swerving down the road and pulled him over. In the back of the truck he found a shocking arsenal: a loaded Ruger bolt-action rifle with a scope and bipod, a Remington bolt-action rifle with a scope, boxes of ammunition, two wigs, a bulletproof vest, and walkie-talkies. Three backpacks contained a mobile drug lab: the chemicals and glass vessels needed to cook a good quantity of meth. FBI and Secret Service agents had been monitoring white supremacist agitators coming into Denver and their chatter about hurting Obama. This had the look of the heavily armed plot the agents had feared.
Gartrell’s arrest led FBI and Secret Service agents to extensively question all three. Johnson admitted that he believed Adolf and Gartrell had come to Denver to kill Obama. He reaffirmed those plans in a jailhouse interview with a news reporter the next day. “Yeah, they were here to do that, to assassinate him,” Johnson said. “He don’t belong in political office. Blacks don’t belong in political office. He ought to be shot.”
A day after FBI agents told a federal judge they had unearthed a serious plot to kill a presidential candidate, U.S. Attorney Troy Eid in Denver pulled back from that claim. In a news conference, he dismissed the trio’s chatter in a hotel as “more aspirational, perhaps, than operational.” Eid said that the men would face charges for drug and gun possession, but that agents lacked evidence the men had done anything more than talk about hurting Obama. “A bunch of meth heads get together, we don’t know why they do what they do,” Eid said. “If you’re talking about a true threat, there has to be some evidence they’re not just talking about it or thinking about it, especially in a drug-induced state.”
Nick Trotta, the Secret Service’s head of protective operations, downplayed the white supremacist threat, despite the fact that the FBI did have hard proof that another set of white supremacist agitators had traveled to Denver with the goal of making trouble. “I think that it’s something that, at times, the media tried to make more of,” Trotta said in an interview. “We’ve always watched them, as we watch all the other groups.”
The top prosecutor and Secret Service’s agreement not to charge the armed men surprised other prosecutors around the country and former Secret Service agents. Throughout modern history, people who had gotten close to hurting the president rarely had the best-laid plans or clearest thinking. Obsession could sometimes make up for lack of precision. But Eid noted that the three men didn’t even know the hotel where Obama was staying.
The Secret Service was slightly more worried that October when they were alerted to a strange killing spree that two skinheads had been planning. Daniel Cowart of Tennessee and Paul Schlesselman of Arkansas shared a disgust at the idea of a Black president. They met online through a mutual friend and soon got together to craft an action plan. First, they would behead fourteen Black children and shoot eighty-eight others, starting at a local Black school. Then, wearing white tuxedos and top hats, they would assassinate Senator Obama by driving into his motorcade with guns blazing.
The numerology meant something in the skinhead underworld. The number 88 represented the letters HH, standing for “Heil, Hitler.” A fourteen-word credo guided white power groups: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
A county sheriff’s deputy arrested the pair, largely by luck. The men had fired some practice rounds at a Black evangelical church a few miles from Cowart’s home. No one was injured, but it made the news, and they later bragged about their efforts to a friend. The friend’s mother reported them to the police. While they were being questioned, the two skinheads confessed to their grander plan.
According to an agent’s interview, “Both individuals stated they knew they would and were willing to die in the attempt.”
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ON NOVEMBER 4, 2008, at just after 11 p.m., CNN called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The Obamas watched the returns with extended family at a hotel room near Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of a quickly growing Obama campaign rally. The densely packed crowds gathered there broke into cheers and dancing when news broadcasters announced his win.
The elated throng was twice the size expected for the rally—roughly 240,000 people—when Obama finally took the stage at one in the morning. Few could know the lengths to which the Secret Service had gone to protect the president-elect for that memorable twenty-five-minute speech. The Service had installed two van-sized sheets of bulletproof glass—ten feet high and fifteen feet wide—on the right and left sides of Obama’s lectern. Television viewers couldn’t see the glass, but in person they were as obvious as a two-ton block of ice. The two-inch-thick plates were intended to shield Obama from the risk of snipers in the high-rises above the park. Agents tested the placement of the glass by taking up positions in apartments above and “firing” red laser beams at agents standing in for Obama. The airspace around the park had also been made a no-fly zone for the night. The supervisor overseeing protection for the event thanked the Obama campaign for instantly agreeing to a raft of extra precautions.
“They never blinked when we told them we had to do the glass,” the supervisor said. “They understood.”
That night, a large part of the country celebrated. But for Obama, the danger had ratcheted up exponentially, literally overnight. The Intelligence Division, which assessed threats to the president, immediately felt itself struggling to triage and assess a skyrocketing number of threats. Agents estimated that in the months immediately before and for several months after he took office, Obama received four times as many death threats as his predecessors—as many as thirty a day.
The weekend after the election, at a Maine convenience store, a sign invited customers to join a betting pool on when Obama would be assassinated. “Let’s hope we have a winner,” the sign read. In Vay, Idaho, police found a sign on a tree offering a “free public hanging” of Obama. At North Carolina State University in Raleigh, anonymous artists had spray-painted KILL THAT NIGGER and SHOOT OBAMA in a tunnel that students used to cross the campus.
Other incitements to violence were less immediately visible. Just as Obama had tapped social media to reach voters and boost his campaign, so his enemies used this vast forum to propose harming him. The ubiquity of Internet chat groups made it far easier in 2008 for people to tap out threats on a keyboard. More than two thousand people joined Stormfront, the oldest and largest white supremacist site on the Internet, in one day—November 5, 2008—the day after Obama won the presidency. The site temporarily crashed due to overwhelming traffic.
“I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how ‘messiahs’ come to rest,” one Stormfront poster wrote in a conversation section a day after Obama’s election. “God has abandoned us, this country is doomed.”
The Secret Service’s well-worn playbook called for sending a field office agent out to interview every single person who made a threat on the president’s life. But the Intelligence Division had no realistic chance of tracking down every person who promised to do harm to Obama on Facebook or in a virtual chat room. Which threats were the careless rantings of a drunk or puffed-up braggart? Which came from mentally unhinged sociopaths who represented a true danger?
CHAPTER 17
SULLIVAN’S CREW
Agency directors—like generals—must master two things to succeed: They need to choose strong lieutenants to execute their plan on the ground, and they must fiercely advocate for the money and equipment their team needs to do the job.
The new Secret Service director, Mark Sullivan, was a tall, handsome man with deep-set eyes and silver hair. He was the father of three girls, an avid athlete, and a former college hockey player who continued to play hard in his fifties. He projected vitality as well as gravitas. He had twenty years of experience in protection and was skilled at charming the powerful. On the surface, Sullivan seemed destined to succeed.
And yet, throughout his seven years as director, Sullivan repeatedly struggled to build an effective team and marshal the necessary resources. Though he was deeply loyal to the Secret Service, Sullivan ultimately left it weaker than he found it.
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MARK SULLIVAN GREW up in the white middle-class Boston suburb of Arlington, Massachusetts, the oldest son in a large Catholic family. He applied to the Secret Service not long after college but was rejected the first time he applied. He regrouped, logged a few years as an investigator for the federal housing department’s Office of Inspector General to improve his résumé, and got hired in 1983 as a baby agent in the Detroit field office. He quickly impressed his bosses with his ability to master complex fraud investigations. Senior agents also considered him a natural at protection, first as a new agent on the Clinton family detail and later as a top deputy in charge of Vice President Cheney’s detail.
It was also clear to Sullivan’s peers that he had big career plans for himself. He was always focused on the next promotion, and he continually angled for face time with the VIPs the Service protected. As a rookie agent with the Clinton family, he complained to his supervisors about being relegated to the Chelsea detail, and he lobbied to replace other agents who had lots of shifts with Mrs. Clinton.
