Former Secret Service Agent Dishes About The Clintons

It's unusual for former Secret Service agents to talk about protectees, but this guy apparently saw enough that he wasn't content to keep it to himself:

In a breach of tradition, a former U.S. Secret Service agent has self-published a book that savages the Clinton White House staff as arrogant and rude, suggests former first lady Hillary Clinton was aloof and charges that Bill Clinton endangered himself and agents for a “totally pointless photo op” on the South Korea-North Korea border.

In several anecdotes, former agent Dan Emmett revealed that Clinton’s young staff had “fundamental traits of rudeness and arrogance” that teetered on the verge of being dangerous at times. “Most of these youngsters were from wealthy families, and many viewed Secret Services agents as the hired help,” he writes in “Within Arms’s Length,” an autobiography that provides new details of the inner Secret Service.

In one case he told of an unnamed Clinton staffer who challenged a KGB agent during a 1993 presidential visit to Russia “as if he were dealing with a Wackenhut security officer in Toledo.”

In another, he wrote of a female staffer who wouldn’t listen to Emmett’s security advice. “She stared at me with a look as if her father had just told her she couldn’t go to the mall with her friends and get a tattoo or body piercing,” he wrote. “My patient attempts to reason were met with childlike emotion born of a past where no one in authority--probably beginning with her parents--had ever said no to her about anything.”

On the first lady, he describes her as aloof, someone who didn’t say “thank you” to agents while the president and former first daughter Chelsea typically did. He told Secrets, “she was not as out-going or cordial.”

I had a friend who was an agent for 20 years. At one point in his career her served on the team for one of Gerald Ford's kids, he headed up the Los Angeles office for awhile, and near the end of his career was part of the Clinton campaign detail in 1992. After seeing what America had elected he retired from the agency a few months after Clinton took office.