President Trump has sparked fresh controversy in his first week back in office with his decision to remove security details from several prominent people with whom he has fallen out.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook all had their government-provided security teams taken away this week.
Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for almost 40 years, including at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser, and Pompeo was Trump’s secretary of State. Hook was a key Pompeo aide.
All four men have fallen out of favor with Trump, with Bolton in particular now a strident critic of the president.
Fauci wrote a 2024 book that was hardly a full-on takedown of Trump but did refer to the contentious relationship between the two, and what the doctor saw as the president’s blithe “disregard of facts.”
Pompeo mulled running against Trump in the 2024 GOP primary, though he ultimately decided not to do so.
The bottom line is that Trump’s move has stoked suspicions that he is acting out of a desire for retribution.
Those fears are magnified by the president’s shoulder-shrugging response to the potential consequences of his decision.
Speaking to reporters in North Carolina on Friday, Trump said he would not feel a sense of responsibility if any of the people from whom he had pulled security came to harm.
Trump also noted, “You can’t have a security detail for the rest of your life because you worked for the government.”
And he contended: “They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security, too.”
Fauci, at least, was reported by several media outlets to have put private security personnel in place after his government detail was stripped from him by Trump.
Critics of the president contend he is making a disingenuous case.
It is certainly true that people who work in government, even at senior levels, cannot expect to have lifelong security. Among former elected officials, only presidents and their families retain a Secret Service security detail as a matter of course.
But other security teams are put in place in response to specific threats, or to guard against more generalized but credible dangers, for particular individuals.
Fauci, for example, has long been a target of people at the nexus of the anti-vaccine movement, the populist right and the COVID-19 conspiracy community.
In 2020, when the nation was in the thick of the pandemic, Fauci said grimly that it was “amazing” that he was “getting death threats for me and my family and [people] harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security.”
In August 2022, Thomas Patrick Connally Jr., 57, was sentenced to more than three years in prison for making threats to Fauci and his family, as well as targeting some other health officials.
Prosecutors said Connally’s conduct included an email threatening that Fauci and his family would be “dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire.”
Last year, the FBI’s field office in Miami issued an alert for an Iranian man, Majid Dastjani Farahani, whom the bureau alleged was an intelligence officer for Tehran and who was wanted for questioning “in connection with the recruitment of individuals for various operations in the United States, to include lethal targeting of current and former United States Government officials.”
The FBI contended that the Iranian regime wanted such an operation carried out in revenge for the 2020 killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike during Trump’s first term.
At the time the FBI issued its alert, it was widely reported that Pompeo — serving as secretary of State at the time — was one of the people the Iranians wanted to kill.
As for Bolton, an Iranian man was charged in absentia in 2022 for purportedly attempting to arrange his murder.
Prosecutors alleged that Shahram Poursafi, who remains at large outside the United States, had offered an unnamed individual who was serving as a government informant $300,000 to kill the former national security adviser.
In a statement posted to social media on Tuesday, Bolton declared himself “disappointed but not surprised” by Trump’s decision to end his Secret Service protection. Bolton further noted that former President Biden, while in office, had provided for the continuation of the security detail, despite Bolton’s robust criticisms of Biden’s policies.
“The American people can judge for themselves which President made the right call,” Bolton concluded.
Some security experts have gone public with concerns over Trump’s moves.
“The president has put Ambassador Bolton and Pompeo at significant risk,” former Secret Service agent John Wackrow told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday.
But a newly emboldened Trump surely won’t turn back on the decision.
The new president and his most fervent MAGA allies are still smarting over resistance they believe they received internally during his first term from members of the foreign policy establishment and the intelligence community.
The likelihood is that, save for a worst-case scenario developing in the future, the furor over the stripping of the security details will pass, supplanted by new Trump controversies.
The lesson, however, will not be lost on anyone in Trump’s circle during his second term who feels tempted to go public with their dissent.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
