The Secret Service Should Be Accountable For Its Crimes

I am not anti-police. In fact, I worked in various aspects of law enforcement for about 30 years -- and I was proud of that service to my community, state, and country. But I get upset when law enforcement agents of any kind think they are above the laws they expect others to obey.

In this country, no one is above the law -- not the president, not members of Congress, not the Supreme Court, and certainly not law enforcement agents at any level. All citizens, no matter how powerful or what their job, should be expected to obey the law.

That brings me to the current Secret Service debacle. As early as December of 2020, the Secret Service was told to make sure they protected the government documents they created. This included any texts or other communications on their government-issued phones.

They should not have had to be told. They knew their communications were government documents, and they also knew that destroying government documents was a federal crime. 

But they ignored instructions, and they ignored the law. We now know that some agents deleted the texts on their phones that were sent or received on January 5th and 6th. It does not matter why they did this -- whether they were just embarrassed at their chatter, or whether they were trying to protect a president they served and liked. They broke the law, and there is no legitimate excuse for any law enforcement agent to break the law.

We give law enforcement people a great deal of power. Because of that, we must hold them to a high standard. Breaking the law is a violation of that standard, and of the oath they took.

Any agent that deleted the texts on their phone should be fired, and they should be charged with a federal crime (destroying government documents). Anything less would put them above the law -- and that must not happen in a constitutional democracy. 

The director of the Secret Service should also be terminated.