In an angry Facebook post, a top Secret Service agent confessed she would rather go to jail than take a bullet for Donald Trump. The Washington Examiner was the first to report the agent’s blockbuster confession on Tuesday.
Kerry O’Grady, the disgruntled agent who penned the anti-Trump screed, serves as the Special Agent in Charge of the protective agency’s operations in Denver. Her LinkedIn page states that she has served in that capacity since May of 2015 and has worked for the Secret Service since 1994.
According to the Washington Examiner’s Susan Crabtree, who first reported the story, O’Grady posted the following message on Facebook prior to Trump’s election:
As a public servant for nearly 23 years, I struggle not to violate the Hatch Act. So I keep quiet and skirt the median. To do otherwise can be a criminal offense for those in my position. Despite the fact that I am expected to take a bullet for both sides. But this world has changed and I have changed. And I would take jail time over a bullet or an endorsement for what I believe to be disaster to this country and the strong and amazing women and minorities who reside here. Hatch Act be damned. I am with Her.
After “greater reflection” O’Grady told the Washington Examiner that she decided to delete the post.
“I recognize that the agency is the most important thing to me,” she said. “My government is the most important thing to me. . . I serve at the pleasure of the president, but I still have the First Amendment right to say things.”
The same day Trump was sworn into the Oval Office, O’Grady changed her Facebook cover photo to the logo for the Women’s March in opposition to the president. She also changed her profile photo to an image of Star Wars’s Princess Leia with the words: “A woman’s place is in the resistance.”
This isn’t the first time a member of the Secret Service has embarrassed the agency tasked with defending the president’s life. In 2014, agents were sent home from the Netherlands when one of them was found drunk and passed out in an Amsterdam hotel hallway. The agents were in the country preparing for a visit from President Obama scheduled to occur the next day.
In 2011, the Secret Service, initially unaware that a gunman had fired at the White House, thoroughly botched the investigation of what exactly happened.
In April of 2015, a Secret Service supervisor was placed on leave following charges of sexual harassment from a female employee. That scandal came on the heels of news that two other agents, suspected of being drunk, literally drove through an active bomb investigation, nearly hitting the suspicious device that was thought to be a bomb.
A 2015 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General revealed that dozens of Secret Service agents accessed Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s secret personnel files in an effort to smear him.
The Secret Service has not publicly stated whether O’Grady would be permitted to keep her job after publicly declaring her refusal to do everything in her power to protect the president.
