On the 56th anniversary of his father’s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, made a renewed plea for Secret Service protection on Wednesday, arguing in an interview on Fox News that he was at increased risk To be targeted by his family history.
“I was with my father when he died in Los Angeles in 1968,” said Mr. Kennedy, who was 14 at the time of the shooting. He then claimed that the White House “had a hand in this decision” to deny his requests for Secret Service protection, arguing that his campaign was significant enough to deserve that protection.
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Kennedy has been filing requests for intelligence protection for more than a year, even before he ran as an independent candidate. Last July, while still running against President Biden in the Democratic primary, he said a request for intelligence information was rejected by Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, who has the authority to approve those requests.
Mr Kennedy has made this request repeatedly since then, circulating an online petition in his support, but it has been rejected each time. In his interview on Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy pointed to several incidents that demonstrated his need for additional security, including break-ins at his home in California and an incident in September in which an armed man was arrested at a campaign rally and charged with firearms crimes, after attempting to meet Mr. Kennedy.
Mr. Mayorkas has previously said he rejected Mr. Kennedy’s requests based on the recommendations of a panel of senior congressmen.
“Ultimately it’s my decision, but I’ve followed their recommendation every time,” he said in May.
Mr. Mayorkas may consider several factors when deciding who should receive protection, and those criteria give preferential treatment to major party candidates. Before Nikki Haley ended her Republican presidential campaign, the congressional panel recommended that she receive Secret Service protection, in part because of her strength in national polls. The Secret Service also notes that “some candidates already received protection early in the campaign, according to presidential memoranda.”
For a candidate in the Democratic or Republican primary, the voting threshold is 15 percent or higher for 30 consecutive days. For an independent or external candidate, the threshold is 20 percent. According to Real Clear Politics, which is listed in the guidelines as one of the polling benchmarks, Kennedy is averaging 10 percent nationally.
This threshold, with few exceptions, has prevented most third-party or independent candidates from receiving Secret Service protection. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, ran as a third-party presidential candidate in 1968 and was appointed to the Secret Service by President Lyndon B. Johnson after Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Mr. Kennedy’s father, was killed during the Democratic primary that year.
The rules have changed significantly over time. After Senator Kennedy’s death, Secret Service protections for presidential candidates were significantly expanded, but rules have historically been restrictive for third-party candidates. Ross Perot, the most prominent third-party candidate since Wallace, did not seek Secret Service protection during his presidential campaign, so it is unclear whether he would have been eligible.
Mr. Kennedy said on Wednesday that the Secret Service’s protection had been given to candidates “who have much lower poll numbers and much lower risk profiles than I do.” In other interviews, Mr. Kennedy has cited Jesse Jackson as an example of someone with “a tiny fraction of my poll numbers” who received a Secret Service appointment. But Mr. Jackson ran as a Democrat, not an independent, and at one point in his campaign in 1984 he was polling at 20 percent.
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2024-06-06 02:44:24
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