Ronald Kessler: Obama ‘Blind’ to Secret Service Failures Because, Like with ISIS, He ‘Doesn’t Really Understand Danger’ 

On Breitbart News Sunday, veteran Washington journalist Ronald Kessler said President Barack Obama is in denial about how the many Secret Service lapses and scandals that have occurred during his presidency endanger his own life because, like with ISIS, he “doesn’t really understand danger.”

Kessler, the author of the riveting book, The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents, told Breitbart News Executive Chairman and host Stephen K. Bannon that agents have told him that “it’s a miracle that there has already not been an assassination, given all the corner-cutting and the cover-ups that occur.”

Kessler said “it’s pretty scary how easy it would be to take out a president” and it is “outrageous” that Secret Service agents would routinely allow people to enter events without magnetometer screenings because “you could have five people with grenades come in and take out the president.”

Obama, according to Kessler, “has just stubbornly resisted” recommendations from a four-person panel that he bring in an outside director to change the agency’s culture because Obama is “sort of mesmerized by his own detail” and lacks the management experience to make the requisite reforms.

Kessler said Obama “doesn’t really understand danger–we see it with ISIS… we see him minimizing the threat.”

“But when it comes to the Secret Service, that’s his own life that is at stake,” Kessler said. “That’s the lives of his family that’s at stake. But he’s still blind to the danger.”

Kessler blamed the Secret Service’s culture of “punishing agents who report threats and problems and rewarding agents who sort of cover up, who go along, and who do not report problems and pretend that the Secret Service is invincible” for enabling the numerous scandals that have occurred during Obama’s presidency. He said it was simply “unbelievable” that the agency’s new director Joe Clancy, for instance, was notified five days after drunk Secret Services slammed into a White House barricade.

Going back to the White House party crashers (the Salahis), Kessler told Bannon that Secret Service agents feel that there is often a disincentive to do strictly abide by the agency’s rules. He noted that the Salahis and even a third party crasher (Kessler broke that news) got through because agents likely believed that “their own management will not back” them if they had turned away someone who was supposed to be on the guest list.

Kessler recalled an incident involving Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, Mary, in which Mary Cheney asked agents to act like taxi drivers and take her and her friends to restaurants. Kessler said Mary Cheney threw a fit when they rightfully refused, and the management of the Secret Service removed her detail leader, who was simply doing his job and following the rues. Kessler said such actions send a message to agents that, “we should let everyone in, don’t worry about it… so what if someone gets assassinated.”