Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from producer Raymond Rapada. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren Summertime, traditionally, is when things slow down at the White House. But on the other side of the 13-foot fence that surrounds the campus, it’s the busy season. Earlier this month, a routine traffic stop turned deadly when a driver, whom Secret Service officers pulled over for an expired registration, attempted to flee. The driver ran a red light, hitting pedestrians in the crosswalk at 17th Avenue and Constitution Avenue, killing one of them. For the U.S. Secret Service officers patrolling gates, checkpoints and the surrounding environs, most encounters are less serious, even during a time of year when the froth of tourists and protesters swirling around the White House perimeter swells — when officers tend to encounter more random people showing up expecting to talk to President JOE BIDEN. “A couple times a week, and more often than that when the weather is nice, people will just walk up to the officers on the street and say, ‘I need to talk to the president right now,’” said BRAD MILLIKEN, who monitored such interactions from inside the White House Operations Center before leaving the position last year. “A vast majority of these people are unwell,” he said. But he noted that some are innocent tourists — police officers from around the country who believe their badge might allow them special access or, in a few cases, elderly individuals who’d been catfished by online scammers into believing they could meet the president by showing up. These strange encounters rarely rise to the level of meriting any kind of written report. But they do test the security apparatus put in place to protect the White House (and, occasionally, the patience of officers). Milliken took note of the stranger stories from his tenure and agreed to share them with West Wing Playbook to shed more light on the sometimes mundane, sometimes entertaining, always serious day-to-day work of those tasked with keeping the president secure. One incident occurred shortly after Biden took office when Covid-19 still ran rampant: a man who showed up with a surprising — and specific — plan to eradicate the pandemic. “This guy said he wanted to tell Biden to sign an executive order to give all of the Marines falcons, " Milliken recalled. “He wanted to train the Marines in falconry and then send them around the country to eliminate the rodents and vermin that he thought were actually spreading Covid.” Another memorable incident involved a man from rural Montana, who Milliken likened to Forrest Gump, who said he had hitchhiked for six months to talk to the president. The officer the man met outside the White House, Milliken said, made clear that wasn’t going to happen. “That’s usually the moment where you’re thinking: ‘Here we go,’” Milliken said. “But the guy just turned around and walked away. He said something like, ‘Yeah, this was dumb, what was I thinking?’ The officer asked if he could do anything else to help the man and he was just like, ‘Nah, I’m just going to hitchhike back to Montana now.’” “It was shockingly rational behavior for a guy who’d just spent so many months doing something completely irrational.” While many of the misbegotten visitors showing up at the White House gates engender empathy, others who come to draw attention to themselves or their cause can be viewed antagonistically. Take, for instance, a situation that played out in the fall of 2021 on a day neither Biden nor Vice President KAMALA HARRIS were at the White House, when protesters from the Sunrise Movement chained themselves to the White House fence. “The officer asked them how long they were hoping to stay and they said, ‘Until we get arrested.’ And the officer said, ‘OK then, we can go ahead and get started,” Milliken said. “And the protesters said, ‘Well, actually, can you wait a minute until our friend who’s live-streaming this gets here?’ And the officer said, ‘Sure. I’m here all day.’ It was civil to the point of absurdity.” Individual officers all have their stories, Milliken added. And while it stands to reason that, eventually, the men and women in uniform who spend their days at the crossroads of public access and securing the most powerful seat of American government have seen it all, the truth of the matter is the surprises never cease. “You start thinking you’ve seen it all, and you know, no matter what, you haven’t,” Milliken said. MESSAGE US — Are you KIMBERLY CHEATLE, director of U.S. Secret Service? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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