Ronald Kessler - The First Family Detail

But agents who were on Snow’s detail say otherwise. Snow “was messing around quite a bit, and it was pretty disturbing to the guys on the detail, because we knew we were away from home for the express purpose of him to meet up with his mistress,” says a former agent who was on his detail.

One morning, an agent was walking by the front window of Snow’s house in Richmond and saw Snow and the alleged mistress kissing. At another point, the woman’s husband came home while Snow was seeing her in the couple’s home. An agent banged the doors of his Suburban and called out the husband’s name to try to alert Snow. As the husband was walking into his house, Snow came out, his hair messed up.

The woman would also fly to Washington and see Snow at his rented apartment.

“She knew all of us by name,” a former agent says. “She’d just come out of the woodwork out of nowhere and say, ‘Hey guys!’ We’d go on hikes, and she’d be there. She was always around.”

What infuriated agents is that Snow seemed to think he was successfully pulling the wool over their eyes.

In commenting, Cullen said neither Snow nor his family “improperly used the services of the U.S. Secret Service detail assigned to him. The Secret Service is required to protect the secretary of the treasury,” Cullen said. “Protection is mandatory. It is not discretionary. Nor is it assigned on the basis of a threat assessment for a particular event or trip.”

Snow considers Secret Service agents “professional, brave, and extremely hardworking,” Cullen said. While Snow is “surprised and saddened that a former Secret Service agent would be a source of any information—particularly anonymous, erroneous information—going into a book, he believes that the honor and historic tradition of the Secret Service will remain intact, and he recalls with great fondness and affection the brave members of his detail.” In view of that, Cullen said, Snow is “surprised that you would imply in your book that he had asked or demanded that his detail ever deviate from their proper role.”

In fact, while Snow’s lawyer is correct in saying that the treasury secretary, along with others in the line of succession to the presidency, is required to have Secret Service protection when the secretary of homeland security authorizes it, he is wrong in saying that this book suggests that Snow asked that his detail deviate from their proper role.

The Secret Service is required to provide protection when a government official such as Snow chooses to travel from Washington every weekend, whether to see his mistress, his wife, or a play. The question is whether government officials should be taking such frequent personal trips when American taxpayers are footing the bill.

Deciding when to protect a presidential candidate is a cat-and-mouse game. Some candidates want protection simply because it gives them more credibility as a contender and makes their lives easier. Others shun protection even when they become viable candidates and have received threats.

By law, the Secret Service provides protection of major presidential and vice presidential candidates and their spouses. The secretary of homeland security determines who the major candidates are after consulting with an advisory committee consisting of the speaker and minority leader of the House and the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, who select one additional member.

The secretary of homeland security decides when to initiate protection. Protection of spouses starts 120 days before the general election, unless the DHS or an executive order authorizes it sooner. To protect a presidential candidate, the Secret Service spends an extra $38,000 a day beyond agents’ regular salaries. That includes airline tickets for agents and for advance personnel, rental cars, meals, and overtime.

Especially during campaigns, the Secret Service’s dual roles of providing protection and investigating financial crimes complement each other. Agents pursuing financial crimes gain investigative experience and forge partnerships with local law enforcement. That comes in handy when agents engage in protection. At the same time, when presidential campaigns begin, the agency can pull agents from investigating financial crimes to protect candidates. In man-hours, slightly more than half of agents’ time is devoted to protection.

While Barack Obama never received a specific threat before his protection started on May 3, 2007, agents on the Secret Service’s Internet Threat Desk homed in on a number of vaguely threatening and nasty comments, mostly directed at the fact that he is African-American.

In the end, according to Steven Hughes, who was then deputy special agent in charge of the Dignitary Protection Division, “we really picked him up because he asked for the protection, and then it goes through a whole process of whether we will protect him or not, and it’s really not driven by the Secret Service. It’s something that he asked for, and the secretary of homeland security and the president ultimately said he is a viable candidate, and it’s a go for protection.”

Mitt Romney began receiving Secret Service protection on the evening of February 1, 2012. For four months before that, Romney paid for his own private protection from U.S. Safety and Security, headed by former Secret Service agent Joseph Funk.

As with any candidate, top Secret Service officials met with Mitt and Ann Romney to discuss protection. By then, Romney was receiving about one threat a day, mainly by letter or phone. In fact, a day before the Secret Service picked up protection, as Romney walked to the stage inside a warehouse in Eagan, Minnesota, a gay rights activist who said he represented the group Glitterati and Occupy Minneapolis threw a cup of glitter on Romney. The glitter poured over Romney’s hair, stuck to his face, and shimmered from his navy blazer. Local police escorted the man out.

A week after Secret Service protection began, Peter Smith, a twenty-year-old college student, tossed a handful of blue glitter at Romney as the former Massachusetts governor was shaking hands with supporters in Denver. At the time, Smith was interning for the Democratic-controlled state senate in Colorado. He was fired after the incident and later pleaded guilty to a charge of disturbing the peace.

“We made the request to ask them to provide protection,” says a high-ranking Romney campaign staffer. “We were not eager to get it. Mitt had the financial means to provide his own security. We also understood the drawbacks of Secret Service protection. We felt it created a distance between a candidate and the voters that we were not eager to have. But there were threats almost daily, and our security company said it was getting to the point where they could not guarantee his safety.”

The fifteen Secret Service agents on Romney’s detail found that the Romneys treated them like family. Although the agents usually declined, the Romneys invited them to lunch and dinner. Romney would kibitz with them and with the additional agents on Ann’s detail. When a female agent brought her young son to a debate at Hofstra University, Romney took him aside and discussed government and politics with him.

On August 29, 2012, a female agent accidentally left her gun in the bathroom of Romney’s campaign plane on a flight from Florida to Indiana. An Associated Press reporter discovered the weapon and decided to write about the incident. As a result, the Secret Service removed the agent, who had been assigned to act as liaison with the press corps, from the campaign. Romney and his aides were distressed.