The Guardian: “Two Trump family members got ‘inappropriately – and perhaps dangerously – close’ to agents protecting them while Donald Trump was president, according to a new book on the US Secret Service. Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, by the Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, is published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy. Leonnig won a Pulitzer prize in 2015, for her reporting on security failures at the Secret Service.”

“In her new book, she writes that Secret Service agents reported that Vanessa Trump, the wife of the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, ‘started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family’. Vanessa Trump filed for an uncontested divorce in March 2018. Leonnig reports that the agent concerned did not face disciplinary action as neither he nor the agency were official guardians of Vanessa Trump at that point. Leonnig also writes that Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, broke up with a boyfriend and ‘began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail’. Secret Service leaders, the book says, ‘became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent’. Agents are prohibited from forming personal relationships with those they protect, out of concern that such feelings could cloud their judgment. Both Tiffany Trump and the agent said nothing untoward was happening, Leonnig writes, and pointed out the nature of the agent’s job meant spending time alone with his charge. The agent was subsequently reassigned.”