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30-08-2025
WASHINGTON: United States President Donald Trump has revoked Secret Service protection for his political opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, White House officials have told several news agencies.
The change revealed on Thursday means that Harris will lose protection from the federal law enforcement agency on September 1, according to the reports.
Former vice presidents are typically afforded six months of Secret Service protection upon leaving office, but former President Joe Biden had quietly signed a directive extending protection for his deputy shortly before his term ended in January.
The move came at a particularly charged time in US politics, with Trump facing two assassination attempts in the lead-up to the November 2024 vote.
Harris had replaced Biden as the Democratic candidate in the final stretch of the race, challenging Trump for 107 days before her election loss.
The removal of protection comes shortly before Harris, who has kept a low profile since her resounding defeat, is set to begin a book tour later this year. That will see her appear at several public events.
Harris, the former attorney general of California and the first woman and woman of colour to serve as vice president, has said the book will give a “behind-the-scenes account” of her mad-dash campaign, which followed Biden’s ill-fated decision to stand for a second term despite mounting concerns over the octogenarian’s advanced age.
Kirsten Allen, a senior adviser to Harris, struck a diplomatic tone in responding to the move.
“The vice president is grateful to the United States Secret Service for their professionalism, dedication, and unwavering commitment to safety,” she said, according to the Reuters news agency.
Others were less forgiving, with some critics pointing to Trump’s caustic attacks on Harris on the campaign trail, which included deriding Harris as a “radical” and “extremist” and invoking several anti-Black tropes.
That, coupled with Trump’s pardoning of supporters who took part in political violence at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, has piqued concerns of retaliation.
“He’s spent months pardoning his supporters and green-lighting political violence,” Tanisha Long, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based community organizer, wrote on X.
“He created his own personal lynch mob of bigots and then cancelled Secret Service protection for Kamala Harris.”
Trump had previously revoked security clearance from other political foes and former allies, including his former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
US authorities had previously said Bolton, who has become a prominent critic of Trump, was the subject of an Iranian assassination plot.
In August, 2022, United States authorities have accused an alleged member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of plotting to assassinate former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, probably in retaliation for the killing Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
The US Department of Justice revealed the charges against Shahram Poursafi, of Tehran, on Wednesday, accusing him of offering an unidentified US-based individual $300,000 to carry out the killing in Washington, DC or neighboring Maryland.
Bolton, a foreign policy hawk and vocal advocate of regime change in Iran, served as national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, but he left the job before a US drone attack killed Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020.
“Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, through the Defendant, tried to hatch a brazen plot: assassinate a former US official on US soil in retaliation for US actions,” Matthew Graves, US attorney for Washington, said in a statement. (Int’l News Desk)
