(Zero Hedge)—The threat environment facing individuals under U.S. Secret Service protection, including President Trump, is the highest the agency has ever recorded, a senior official said during a background briefing with reporters, according to CNBC.
“What we’re seeing now is something I’ve never seen before,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of a public briefing.
The Secret Service has logged roughly 10,000 cases involving threats against government officials, including Supreme Court justices, so far in 2026 – a 40% increase from the same period a year earlier.
“They’re increasing in volume and complexity,” the official warned. The agency has also recorded a tenfold increase in mental-health commitments of individuals suspected of threatening protectees.
The remarks landed a week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a House subcommittee that threats against her and her colleagues on the Court have risen sharply.
Why They’re Briefing Now
The timing is not incidental. The briefing came ahead of Friday’s rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, which Trump is expected to attend.
It needed rescheduling because of what happened at the last one. In April, a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun and knives stormed a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton during the dinner, with the president in attendance, before being apprehended. Cole Tomas Allen now faces charges of attempting to assassinate the president.
That was not an isolated event. On May 4, a man was wounded in a firefight with Secret Service personnel near the Washington Monument. Three weeks later, on May 23, a gunman approached the White House while Trump was inside the residence, drew a firearm and discharged multiple rounds before being fatally shot by agents. In February, Secret Service and local police shot and killed a man armed with a shotgun who had breached a secure perimeter at Mar-a-Lago.
Four incidents in six months, at four separate protected sites. That is the ledger behind the 40% figure.
The Butler Problem
The current alarm builds on two assassination attempts in 2024. On July 13 of that year, gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing attendee Corey Comperatore and seriously wounding two others.
An Office of Inspector General report found that the Secret Service missed more than 100 radio transmissions from local law enforcement about a suspicious individual – now believed to be Crooks – armed with a rangefinder and rifle. Agents failed to relay critical warnings, establish proper joint communications, or secure the rooftop vantage point.
Those findings describe a catastrophic operational breakdown. They do not describe complicity, and the OIG made no such finding. But for the family of the man who died there, the distinction has offered cold comfort.
Comperatore’s widow, Helen Comperatore, made headlines last week when she suggested the attempt on Trump’s life was “an inside job.”
“I believe he was working with somebody,” she told NewsNation. “I believe it was an inside job, inside the government somewhere.” No investigation has produced evidence supporting that claim, and the agency has attributed the failures to breakdowns in communication and planning.
Two months after Butler, a Secret Service officer fired at another gunman, Ryan Routh, who had concealed himself in shrubbery near the perimeter of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh was convicted in Florida federal court last September of attempting to assassinate the president, among other charges, and is serving a life sentence.
The Problem Above The Perimeter
The concern growing fastest inside the agency is one that walks past every countermeasure it has spent a century building. Drones approach from outside conventional security perimeters and cannot be screened, wanded, or turned away at a checkpoint.
The scale is no longer theoretical. The FBI said this week it seized more than 700 illegal drones and detected roughly 1,600 in total across the eleven U.S. stadiums hosting World Cup matches – venues holding tens of thousands of people at a time.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran has said the agency is examining “kinetic solutions – something that we haven’t done before,” and has pushed its technology division to move faster. The OIG’s Butler review separately faulted the agency’s counter-drone training and preparedness, a gap it has since worked to close.
The Foreign File
More recently, Israel shared intelligence with the U.S. indicating a fresh Iranian plot to assassinate Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal. Iran has for years publicly vowed retaliation for the 2020 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, and the ongoing war has sharpened concern about foreign actors targeting the president.
