"Threats Against Obama Drop to Normal Levels" [View All]

Posted Monday, November 09, 2009 7:50 AM

Threats Against Obama Drop to Normal Levels
Mark Hosenball

The mass shooting at Fort Hood by an Army doctor with an Islamic background has raised new anxiety about terrorism and threats to government personnel and installations. But the people assigned to protect President Barack Obama say that in recent months, the number of threats against him has decreased significantly. In a book about the U.S. Secret Service published earlier this year, author Ronald Kessler reported that after Obama took office, threats against the president rose by 400 percent from a rate of around 3,000 per year during the tenure of George W. Bush. According to one widely circulated elaboration on Kessler’s reporting published in August by London’s Daily Telegraph, this means that Obama has been facing 30 death threats each day. In March, Secret Service chief Mark Sullivan told a House Appropriations subcommittee that threats to individuals protected by the Secret Service “remain at high levels.”

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told NEWSWEEK that those figures are now out of date. According to Donovan, there were “substantial spikes” in the rate of threats the service received against Obama before and after last year’s presidential election, and then again before and after Obama’s inauguration last January. Over succeeding months, however, the rate of threats has dropped substantially, Donovan said—so substantially that while the average number of threats received is running at about the same level as it did during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, on some recent days the rate of threats received against Obama has actually been lower than the rate during the reigns of Clinton and W.

Donovan said that it was almost unprecedented for the Secret Service to discuss threat levels in such detail, but said the agency is going public because it is concerned that outdated information continues to circulate regarding a tidal wave of Obama-related threats. For his part, Kessler told NEWSWEEK in an e-mail that while “threats go up and down … the 400 percent increase is correct on average” and added that the Secret Service has been “covering up its deficiencies and dissembling to the media in the face of increased threats against the president.”

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http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2009/11/09/threats-against-obama-drop-to-normal-levels.aspx