The Secret Service has launched an investigation into one of its agents after he allegedly tried to smuggle his wife along on President Donald Trump’s sojourn to Scotland.
The agency employee, who has not been identified, had attempted to sneak his spouse, herself a member of the Air Force, onto a “carplane” support flight being used to transport personnel and equipment ahead of the president’s departure Friday, Secret Service sources told RealClearPolitics reporter Susan Crabtree on Monday.
Crabtree adds the agent is a new recruit who’d allegedly been written up several times for misconduct during his preliminary training.
A spokesperson for the Secret Service told the Daily Beast that “prior to the overseas departure, the employee was advised by supervisors that such action was prohibited, and the spouse was subsequently prevented from taking the flight,” adding that “no Secret Service protectees were aboard and there was no impact to our overseas protective operations.”
Crabtree further reports that the agent’s wife had already, by that point, been present for an official agency briefing at a hotel in Maryland before traveling with personnel to the “distinguished visitor lounge” at Joint Base Andrews, where she was discovered and told to leave.
The revelations represent only the latest blunder to have emerged from President Trump’s weekend getaway to Scotland—one of the United Kingdom’s four constituent countries, and where more than 70 percent of people take a dim view of his policies and politics.
Things were off to a rocky start even before his plane touched down in Glasgow on Friday, with Scottish daily newspaper The National running a front page that read “CONVICTED US FELON TO ARRIVE IN SCOTLAND.”
Traveling from there to his Turnberry resort in the nation’s southwest, his motorcade was met with protesters holding up signs taking potshots at the president over the ongoing Epstein files furor—a sign of things to come, with rallies over the weekend in three cities across the country and outside his two golf courses.
While the president spent much of his time over the weekend golfing (and accompanied by an armored golf cart), the break has reportedly done little to soothe his nerves amid the brewing scandal over latest developments in the Epstein case, with the president telling reporters on Sunday, “I’m actually not in a good mood.”
Those comments followed Trump’s meeting with European Union President Ursula von der Leyen, which yielded a new trade deal with the bloc that was promptly savaged by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for “abandoning [Trump’s] goals” for economic relations with the continent.
All that took place before his press conference Monday ahead of a sit-down with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was almost entirely drowned out by the raucous musical stylings of the president’s own bagpipers.
