Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pointed out the lack of security given to him by the Biden Administration, as he mounts a challenge to President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party nomination.
Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, took his concerns to social media last week, saying the Department of Homeland Security denied his request for Secret Service protection.
“Since the assassination of my father in 1968, candidates for president are provided Secret Service protection. But not me,” Kennedy wrote on X. “Our campaign’s request included a 67-page report from the world’s leading protection firm, detailing unique and well established security and safety risks aside from commonplace death threats.”
In addition to his own father’s assassination, his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963.
Not all candidates are afforded protection, but the high-profile candidates are, although it’s up to the Secret Service. The Homeland Security secretary, in consultation with an advisory committee of the House and Senate, determines which candidates are considered leading candidates.
Typically, the leading candidates have Secret Service protection in the last 120 days of the election cycle. The presidential election is more than a year away, but the Democrats’ South Carolina primary is just 189 days from July 29.
Kennedy said his request to the agency went unanswered for 88 and that finally Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas responded and said “that Secret Service protection for Robert F Kennedy Jr is not warranted at this time.”
Some say Kennedy has no chance against party-backed Joe Biden. But he has overall high favorability, much higher than other leading candidates, according to a Harvard/Harris poll for Newsweek last week. If the election was a winner-takes-all popularity poll, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would win.
During the 2020 race, NPR wrote that it is mostly up to the candidates to ask for protection from the Secret Service.
In a story that wondered why the Secret Service wasn’t assigned to candidates Sen. Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, NPR linked an explanation from the Secret Service, which has since been removed from the agency’s page.
That statement said: “Following a candidate’s formal request, the bi-partisan Candidate Protection Advisory Committee, which consists of the Speaker and Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate and an additional member selected by the committee, makes a recommendation to inform the decision of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”
At that point in March of 2020, neither Biden nor Sanders had requested protection.
The Secret Service has also yet to be assigned to protect Joe Biden’s seventh grandchild, 4-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, who the president finally acknowledged on Friday night after coming under intense criticism for pretending she doesn’t exist.
