When Should Secret Service Step In?
W A S H I N G T O N, May 31 -- As police investigate whether President Bush's daughters broke underage drinking laws, questions are being raised about how much Secret Service agents should intervene in their lives.
Asked today whether agents assigned to keep the girls safe also should keep them from breaking laws, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that the first concern is guarding Barbara and Jenna Bush, both 19.
"The Secret Service's mission is to protect the lives of their protectees, whether they are family members or they are former presidents — whoever they are," Fleischer said. "The Secret Service has one mission, and it is to protect their lives."
Protective and Investigative
In fact, agents have a two-fold mission and consider themselves part of the oldest and most elite law enforcement agency in the nation.
"The Secret Service agents are sworn federal law enforcement officials and have not and would not condone any violation of the law," said Secret Service spokesman Mark Connolly.
But the agency also takes pride in refusing to reveal details of protective assignments. Keeping with tradition, Connolly would not comment on the incident involving the Bush daughters.
"We don't discuss the on- or off-the-record movements or private lives of our protectees — especially their children," Connolly said. "We also don't discuss the methods and means we utilize to carry out our protective responsibility."
The Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department, was launched in 1865 to investigate rampant counterfeiting of U.S. money. Over the years, its focus on protecting the nation's financial system has also evolved into protecting the nation's leaders.
The agency has guarded the president full-time since the early 1900s, after President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Congress expanded that protective authorization to a president's immediate family in 1917.
Keeping Secrets?
The fuzzy line between protection and law enforcement was last thrown into the public debate in 1998, when then-President Clinton tried to keep agents from giving up his secrets before Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury.
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