A top spokesman for the Secret Service and two other agency officials have been placed on leave amid an internal investigation, two senior Trump administration officials said on Wednesday.
The Secret Service’s communications director, Anthony Guglielmi, who has worked at the agency since 2022, was placed on administrative leave, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
In a statement, the Secret Service said that “three non-law enforcement personnel” at the agency were on administrative leave “pending an investigation into potential misconduct.” The investigation is being conducted by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the agency said.
The Secret Service declined to provide additional comment. CNN earlier reported the development.
A spokesman for Mr. Guglielmi, Gregg Bernstein, called him “a professional of deep integrity whose decades-long public record advocating for local, state and federal agencies speaks for itself.”
Mr. Bernstein added: “He holds profound respect for the mission and work of the United States Secret Service and is cooperating fully with everything being asked of him.”
The agency has been under intense scrutiny for years, particularly after two attempts on Donald J. Trump’s life in 2024, when he was a candidate for president. The lead agent from Mr. Trump’s detail during his four years out of office, Sean M. Curran, now oversees the agency.
The Secret Service agents who travel with Mr. Trump were approached for questioning by the F.B.I. as part of a leak investigation, after The New York Times and other news outlets reported that the agency had discussed security concerns about the plane the president flew in to a NATO summit in Turkey in late July.
The Times reported hours later that a jet donated by Qatar, which was retrofitted quickly and pushed into service so that Mr. Trump could fly it while still in office, lacked some of the defensive capabilities of the older Air Force One fleet. The president flew it to Turkey and suggested that he would be leaving on one of the older Air Force One models.
The Washington Post later reported, and The Times confirmed, that Mr. Trump had fooled the public, making a show of boarding the older Air Force One in Turkey before being secretly whisked off the aircraft using a catering container. That left much of the president’s staff, as well as journalists, to fly out of the country without Mr. Trump amid a threat to the plane that officials viewed as credible at the time — in effect making them decoys.
The reporters were never formally told of the switch that day or at any point after. The episode raised significant questions about transparency, particularly given the level of confusion that an attack on the plane could have generated as to whether Mr. Trump was safe.
