The Secret Service continues to endanger the president’s life with lax security, and the government is sitting on information that might expose recent failures which allowed President Trump to get shouted down by Code Pink protesters during a recent outing to a Washington DC restaurant, advocates fear.
“I’m just really concerned about the president’s safety,” Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch told The Post.
“He was almost killed twice supposedly under the protection of the Secret Service and then they walked him into a potentially dangerous ambush,” he said of the September incident at Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab.
The watchdog group has been trying for three months to get information on how the protesters got advance notice about Trump’s closely-held movements — at an event intended to demonstrate that the city was thriving under new federal security protection.
“These people were allowed to get within arm’s length of the sitting president with knives and who knows what else in the restaurant available to them,” Fitton said.
Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker called the incident “an unbelievable security lapse.
“I can’t believe they would let random people sit in that close proximity to them,” he said, adding, “That’s crazy. That’s like’s like the days when Abraham Lincoln would ride down Pennsylvania Avenue in his coach and buggy with no protection.”
Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit Dec. 18 in Washington DC Federal Court seeking “all internal emails and text messages among USSS officials in the Presidential Protective Division regarding the presence of Code Pink protestors” at the eatery.
It also wants “all emails sent between USSS officials and any email account ending in @codepink.org.”
The government allegedly ignored a Dec. 9 deadline to provide the information under the Freedom of Information Act, according to court papers.
Trump dined on Sept. 9 with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the seafood and steak joint.
None of the protesters were accused of violence but Fitton fears anyone armed with key information about the president’s movements — as Code Pink apparently was — could potentially harm the commander in chief.
Video of the encounter showed members of Trump’s security detail speaking into hand-held microphones after the disruption begins and as Trump approaches his table – with the president himself pointing in an indication that the nearby protesters should be removed. The protesters shouted “Free DC. Free Palestine. Trump is the Hitler of our time!”
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Trump survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign – one in Butler, Pennsylvania in July, and the other in September at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida — and a subsequent House task force found inexperienced personnel “did not clearly understand the delineation of their responsibilities.”
Judicial Watch is also seeking Secret Service documents in connection with those close calls.
In the case of Trump’s outing at Joe’s, protesters had more than an hour to book reservations and managed to score a table next next to Trump, then chanted at him before leaving cash on the table and getting escorted out, according to reports at the time.
In yet another concerning incident, the Secret Service failed to detect a guest who brought a Glock handgun onto the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va. while the president was there.
The guest brought the weapon in a bag to the course, where agents were doing manual searches for potential threats.
“The US Secret Service takes the safety and security of our sites very seriously and there are redundant security layers built into every one,” an agency spokesperson said at the time, adding that the person with the gun was never in close proximity to the president.
The agency said all guests at the restaurant were screened before Trump arrived. It declined comment on the lawsuit.
