President Trump plans to announce Secret Service agent Sean Curran, who heads his detail, to be the agency’s director, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.

Curran, who has served in the agency for more than two decades, leads a team of roughly 85 agents who protect the president-elect and has done so over the last two and a half years of his presidential campaign. Curran has the closest relationship to Trump of any current agent and is usually physically closest to him at any given moment in the innermost ring of Secret Service security dedicated to protecting the incoming president’s life on a daily basis.

Curran was one of the first agents to leap on top of Trump during the assassination attempt against the then-Republican nominee for president during the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and can be seen to the right of Trump in the iconic photo of him with a blood-stained face pumping his fist in the air, surrounded by agents against the backdrop of an American flag.

Considering the two assassination attempts against Trump in the final months of the campaign, the president-elect’s choice for Secret Service director is one the most personal and significant decisions for the incoming administration. One of the most powerful points working in Curran’s favor for his selection is his role in repeatedly requesting more security assets for Donald Trump's campaign, despite hitting a brick wall on most of those requests from the Secret Service’s leadership over the course of more than two years.

Curran has written documentation for those denied requests, likely in the form of emails from the Office of Protective Operations, according to several sources in the Secret Service community. Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, with input from her deputy, now acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe, and others, continued the protocol of treating Trump like a former president who didn’t need nor deserve top security assets. But Trump, one of the most well-known and polarizing figures in modern politics, shattered the mold of former presidents.

In continuing that outmoded policy, the USSS leadership failed to meet their own threat-based standard of allocating security assets to protectees. The various formal investigations found that if assets such as more counter snipers and a Counter Surveillance Unit had been provided, shooter Thomas Crooks likely would have been discovered early and interdicted.

Curran has a very good reputation among most agents and in the broader Secret Service community as a whole, though some have expressed concern that he lacks managerial experience and will need to have to switch gears and change his personality from a shift agent and team leader to a much more forceful presence to truly shake up the agency, clean house, and bring about the reforms that so many current and former agents believe the agency desperately needs.

Yet Curran was in the top leadership position of a detail that allowed two assassination attempts against Trump to take place, one in which Trump was shot in the ear and nearly killed – the most embarrassing moment for the agency since President Reagan was shot in the chest by John Hinckley and nearly died outside the Washington Hilton in 1981.

Another attempt occurred outside Trump’s West Palm Beach Golf Club roughly two months later, where Ryan Routh, the perpetrator, was allowed to lie in wait for Trump in the bushes along the perimeter of the club for more than 12 hours until a Secret Service agent protecting Trump on the golf course noticed the end of a rifle sticking out of fencing and pointed toward Trump.

In naming Curran, Trump would be rejecting the recommendations of two blue-ribbon commissions, one in 2015 and last year’s bipartisan Independent Review Panel, that the next president should choose someone from outside the agency to bring about the numerous reforms the panel and Congress have recommended.

During his first term in office, Trump did name the first director from outside the agency, Randolph “Tex” Alles, a former U.S. Marine Corps general and the first Secret Service director selected from outside the agency in its 159-year history.

Trump chose Alles to lead the agency from 2017 to 2019. During that time, Alles built a good rapport among rank-and-file agents, but many believed several agency leaders successfully sabotaged him. Alles was swept out of the agency when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen left her post in April 2019.

Despite Curran's undeniable heroism on the day of the Butler rally and his direct role in saving Trump’s life, the congressional investigations and Independent Review Panel heavily criticized the performance of several agents on the detail Curran managed for failing to place a sniper or any other security asset on top of the building where shooter Thomas Crooks opened fire.

The Independent Review Panel cited multiple failures on the part of the Secret Service that day, including that an inexperienced agent on the Trump detail who was in charge of developing and executing the rally security plan didn’t ensure that an agent was covering the building, allowing Crooks to run across the roof in plain sight of rallygoers and fire eight shots at Trump and the crowd. The flying bullets hit Trump in the ear and killed retired firefighter Corey Comperatore, and seriously wounded two other rallygoers.

That inexperienced young agent is Myotsoty Perez, who had just three years of experience in the Secret Service, and only one as a member of the Trump campaign detail. Her supervisor, Nick Menster, also didn’t quiz her on exactly how the building would be covered by local law enforcement, though he walked through the security plans with her, along with an inspector, one day before the Butler rally, according to the Independent Review Panel’s final report on their findings. The inquiries also heavily criticized siloed communication between the Secret Service and local law enforcement supplementing security. The local police officers first spotted Crooks 90 minutes before he opened fire and continued tracking him but failed to communicate effectively to share their concerns about Crooks with Secret Service agents. The morning the rally began, local law enforcement offered radios to the Secret Service, but the agents never........

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