Secret Service agents and the counter assault team react moments after shots were fired toward then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. ( Jabin Botsford -The Washington Post / Getty Images)
By Ben Zeisloft February 18, 2025 at 7:00am
A female Secret Service trainee shot herself in the leg on Feb. 10, resulting in an injury that required her to be airlifted to a local hospital.
Susan Crabtree, a national political correspondent for RealClearPolitics, revealed on Wednesday via X that a woman training to be a special agent in the Secret Service “shot herself in the leg” at the Secret Service’s Rowley Training Center.
She was then airlifted to an emergency room in Baltimore, Maryland.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi later confirmed to Crabtree that the trainee “sustained a non-life-threatening injury” amid a firearms training exercise.
She was discharged from the hospital that same day.
“The trainee is recovering well, and the incident is under review by the Office of Professional Responsibility,” Guglielmi said.
🚨SECRET SERVICE SCOOP: A woman special agent trainee on Wednesday shot herself in the leg at the Secret Service’s Rowley Training Center and was airlifted to a Baltimore hospital emergency room, according to multiple sources in the Secret Service community.
Developing…I’ll… pic.twitter.com/CgUabINFWA
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) February 13, 2025
The trainee was previously a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer who guarded the White House. She has not had any previous incidents with a weapon.
Crabtree noted that the injury occurred as the Secret Service continues to receive criticism for the July 13 assassination attempt against President Donald Trump and similar security failures.
Does the Secret Service need an overhaul?
Former President Joe Biden’s administration had prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal workplace, while former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who stepped down after the first Trump assassination attempt, had signed onto a national DEI initiative called 30×30.
“It calls for all law enforcement agencies in the country to have at least 30% of their forces be women by the year 2030,” Crabtree described.
“One of the reasons? Because women make fewer arrests,” she continued.
That plan was by no means popular within the agency.
“This 30×30 initiative and the way Cheatle is implementing it in hiring decisions and training qualifications was a major focus of an online petition and its whistleblowers’ concerns that it was impacting Secret Service training, readiness, and performance,” Crabtree added.
“This petition was circulating BEFORE the assassination attempts against Trump,” she noted.
By the time Cheatle left her position, she had managed to pump up the share of female Secret Service members to a substantial 24 percent, according to Crabtree.
That was only 6 percent shy of the 30 percent goal and six years ahead of schedule.
We do not know conclusively whether this woman was hired under any particular diversity program.
But asking the question given this emphasis of packing the Secret Service workforce with new female hires is perfectly legitimate.
The fact that this is a key law enforcement institution, and there are more questions than ever with respect to women serving in police forces or the military.
At the very least, we should all be able to agree that any woman who serves in law enforcement should be held to the same physical standards as a man and that those standards should not be adjusted downward to accommodate them.
The Secret Service has been shooting itself in the foot in recent years.
This time, it was shot in the leg.
In any case, we can all hope that the Secret Service reforms and is able to shoot the bad guys for a change.
Ben Zeisloft is the editor of The Republic Sentinel, a conservative news outlet owned and operated by Christians. He is a former staff reporter for The Daily Wire and has written for The Spectator, Campus Reform, and other conservative news outlets. Ben graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with concentrations in business economics and marketing.
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