A Second Secret Service Agent on JD Vance’s Detail Is Suspected of Leaking to the Press — Six Months After the First One Got Caught on a Fake Date.
A member of Vice President JD Vance’s (R) Secret Service detail — the Vice Presidential Protective Division — is under a new internal-affairs investigation for allegedly leaking operational details to the press, the agency confirmed on July 22, 2026. It is the second suspected leak from inside that same detail in six months, and the employee involved has not been named publicly and has not been charged with anything.
Investigators believe the newest suspected leaker was a source for a July 15 MS NOW story describing friction inside Vance’s security team over his family’s last-minute travel schedule. Neither the reporting itself nor the vice president’s travel habits are what this piece is about.
This is a story about whether the agency built to guard the vice president’s physical safety can guard its own internal information — and six months after the first agent on this same detail got caught doing exactly the opposite, that is still an open question.
- 2 — Secret Service internal-affairs leak investigations opened inside VP Vance's protective detail since January 2026 — U.S. Secret Service
- $16,000–$24,600 — reported per-hour cost to operate Marine Two, the helicopter at the center of the leaked account — MS NOW
- 21.4% — average Secret Service staffing shortfall across fiscal 2023 and 2024 — DHS Inspector General
- 37% — increase in Secret Service agent attrition, 2020 to 2024 — DHS Inspector General
The Secret Service confirmed the new inquiry the morning of July 22, 2026, after CNN and other outlets reported that a Vice Presidential Protective Division agent was suspected of feeding operational information to reporters. Secret Service Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi put the agency’s position in explicit, on-the-record terms.
“A member of the Vice Presidential Protective Division is the subject of an administrative investigation, and potential criminal inquiry, involving allegations of compromising operational and information security. ... Any conduct that undermines the trust and confidence between a protectee and their protective detail is fundamentally incompatible with our mission and will not be tolerated.”
Anthony Guglielmi · Chief of Communications, U.S. Secret Service
Deputy Director Matthew Quinn was more pointed about the travel-schedule friction that supposedly drove the leak, telling reporters that “nights, weekends, and holidays are part of the job” and that agents “work tirelessly to ensure protectees’ safety and security” regardless of when a protectee needs to move. Vance’s office, for its part, kept its response focused on the agents rather than the story: “The Vances are grateful to the men and women of the U.S. Secret Service who serve our country with distinction,” a spokesperson said, adding that protecting “a Vice President with a large policy portfolio and a young and growing family presents a unique challenge,” but that agents “do so with excellence every day.” Neither statement named the employee under review, and no outlet has done so — the case remains open and unproven, and the agent involved is entitled to the same presumption of innocence this publication extends to every pending matter.
The July 15 MS NOW article — reported by Carol Leonnig and Vaughn Hillyard — is the one investigators believe the newest suspected leaker helped source. It described a “building morale problem” among agents on Vance’s detail over what sources called “OTR” moves — off-the-record, last-minute travel that forces agents to scrap existing security plans and build new ones on short notice. The story’s most-repeated detail was a planned July 9 flight aboard Marine Two, the military helicopter that shuttles the vice president, to fly Vance’s son to a golf lesson at Joint Base Andrews; the trip was scrubbed at the last minute for thunderstorms, but not before agents had already built a security plan around it. Marine Two costs the government somewhere between $16,000 and $24,600 an hour to operate, per the same report. MS NOW also reported that agents had grown frustrated enough to make custom coins and stickers mocking the pattern, stamped with Vance’s Secret Service code name “Bobcat” and the motto “Advance. OTR. Repeat.”
None of that reporting is disputed on the facts. What is under investigation is how MS NOW got it: internal scheduling friction, unreleased travel plans, and even joke merchandise made inside a working protective detail are not the kind of material that is supposed to leave that detail’s own ranks, whether or not the underlying frustration is legitimate. That is the throughline here — not whether a vice president’s schedule strains his security team, which agents on nearly every detail have said about nearly every protectee for as long as the job has existed, but whether the people paid to keep that team’s internal workings confidential can actually do it.
The frustration over the last minute asks has boiled over to the point that agents have made custom coins and stickers to mock the frequency of the Vice President's and his family's last-minute travel, using Vance's Secret Service code name, 'Bobcat.'
The July case is not the first time internal-affairs investigators have gone looking inside Vance’s detail. On January 13, 2026, O’Keefe Media Group published a 14-minute undercover video showing a Secret Service agent — publicly identified by O’Keefe, though never confirmed by the agency, as Tomas Escotto — describing protective formations, shift schedules, travel plans, and real-time locations to a woman he had met on a dating app and believed was a romantic interest. She was working for O’Keefe. The video included screenshots of messages in which the agent allegedly sent photos taken aboard Air Force Two and discussed the vice president’s movements days before they happened. O’Keefe reported that the agent, a five-year Secret Service veteran who had previously worked on then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s detail, told the undercover reporter he had voted for Joe Biden and objected to the administration’s immigration enforcement.
The agency’s response was fast: within roughly a day of the video’s release, the employee was placed on administrative leave, his security clearance suspended and his access to Secret Service facilities and systems revoked. Deputy Director Quinn said at the time that the agency has “no tolerance for any behavior that could potentially compromise the safety, privacy or trust of our protectees,” and separately noted the Secret Service has “a 160-year-old tradition of discretion that sets this agency apart.” The agency ordered every employee — not just the one under review — to retake mandatory anti-espionage training.
“The U.S. Secret Service has no tolerance for any behavior that could potentially compromise the safety, privacy or trust of our protectees. ... The U.S. Secret Service has a 160-year-old tradition of discretion that sets this agency apart.”
Matthew Quinn · Deputy Director, U.S. Secret Service
As with the July case, no criminal charges have been publicly filed against the January agent as of this writing; it remains an internal personnel matter unless and until prosecutors say otherwise.
BREAKING: U.S. Secret Service Agent Assigned to VP JD Vance Leaks Sensitive Security Information to Undercover Reporter. Escotto is a holdover from the Biden administration and stated that he voted for Joe Biden, while expressing opposition to ICE & the Trump administration's immigration enforcement.
A Secret Service agent on Vice President JD Vance's security detail is under internal review and has been put on administrative leave after being suspected of leaking information for a news story that included details about Vance's travel, a source familiar with the matter said.
Both leak investigations are landing on top of an agency a federal watchdog says is already struggling to do its core job. A Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report released June 30, 2026, found the Secret Service was understaffed by an average of 21.4% across fiscal 2023 and 2024, with agents logging 1.2 million overtime hours on consecutive shifts with little recuperative rest — conditions the same report ties to a 37% jump in agent attrition from 2020 through 2024. A related OIG finding singled out the agency’s Counter Sniper Team as staffed 73% below what its own mission requirements call for, even as the number of events the team supported grew 151% over the same stretch. None of that data is specific to Vance’s detail, and none of it excuses a leak — but it is the operating environment these agents work inside, and it is why the Secret Service is now running its second agency-wide anti-espionage retraining order in six months rather than treating either case as a one-off.
The Cabinet secretary — Markwayne Mullin (R), sworn in as Secretary of Homeland Security in March 2026; the Secret Service is a DHS component agency and answers to him.
The agency’s director — Sean M. Curran (Trump-appointed), a 23-year Secret Service veteran who led Donald Trump’s personal protective detail — including at the July 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania rally, where he shielded Trump from gunfire — before being named the agency’s 28th director in January 2025.
Congressional oversight — the House Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), holds direct jurisdiction over Secret Service operations through its Subcommittee on Transportation and Protective Security.
Two members of the same vice-presidential protective detail have now been investigated for suspected leaking within six months — one caught on hidden camera describing security procedures to a source he thought was a date, the other suspected of feeding a news outlet internal complaints about the vice president’s travel schedule. Neither has been publicly charged, and both are entitled to a real investigation before any real conclusion. What is not in dispute is the pattern: an agency already short-staffed by a fifth and losing agents faster than it can replace them now has to explain, twice in half a year, why the people trusted with the vice president’s physical safety could not keep his detail’s own operations confidential.
