Secret Service Tried to Cover-Up a Car Accident Involving VP Harris, Called It a ‘Mechanical Failure’

Carole Leonnig wrote the book on the United States Secret Service. Literally, she authored “Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service,” published in 2021. It is safe to assume that Leonnig is in the loop when it comes to sources inside the Secret Service, even when needed to uncover the ultimate cover-up, like the fact that Vice President Harris was involved in a car accident while being transported by the Secret Service.

The Secret Service agent driving Harris in a sport utility vehicle struck the curb of a downtown tunnel hard enough that the vehicle’s tire needed to be replaced, bringing the motorcade to a standstill near Foggy Bottom at about 10:20 a.m., said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.

Harris had to be transferred to another vehicle in the motorcade so agents could safely spirit her to the White House. The routine nature of the travel and the high level of training required for agents who drive the president and vice president led many in the Secret Service, as well as Harris, to question how such an accident could happen.

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These are people trained to drive through terrorist attacks and can speed in and out of any road, anywhere, anytime. It is somewhat amazing and disconcerting that they’d have an accident like that in blocked-off traffic, in a tunnel, with no weather, etc. etc.

. The agency’s protective intelligence division reported that “a mechanical failure” in the lead car had forced agents to transfer Harris to another vehicle during a scheduled movement to the White House, according to details of the alert shared with The Washington Post. By Monday afternoon, Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle received information from other agents that the alert did not accurately convey what happened, one of the people said. In fact, many other Secret Service agents on Harris’s detail and at the White House, as well as Harris, knew her driver had actually hit the side pavement of a tunnel.

Now the accident itself is less a “scare” than the fact that the Secret Service’s first impulse was to cover up the actual cause of the accident. Maybe it was a newly trained driver who just got flustered, maybe something worse. The country wouldn’t know until it was reported correctly, and if the Secret Service is more inclined to keep official records clean than “what actually happened,” that opens a whole new problem.

Who remembers this? Probably no one because it was never presented as “the full story” at any one time:

In 2014, the Service gave incorrect information about a mentally troubled veteran who was able to jump the White House fence, reporting that he was not armed when he was, and that he was stopped at the door when he actually got deep inside the White House mansion.

Read that over a few times. An armed man was able to jump the fence at the White House and got “deep inside the mansion.” That is perilously close to “And then shot Mahlia… President Obama.” Try to imagine the extent that would need to be covered up, and yet one worries that they would, most definitely, cover up their security role in the matter. Who else presumed that the Secret Service would know the second one’s shoes hit the grass at the White House.

In this case, they say a driver merely “overcorrected.” Okay, then have him or her spend more time in training and evaluate whether the driver is competent enough for that duty. Much more importantly, evaluate how things are reported. Of the two “incidents” that day, the latter is far more dangerous.

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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman