Secret Service to Provide Protection for RFK Jr., Mayorkas Says

Ari Natter
·1-min read

(Bloomberg) -- Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he would authorize US Secret Service protection for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

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“The president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection to Robert Kennedy Jr,” Mayorkas told reporters Monday at the White House.

Calls to protect Kennedy, a long-shot candidate who did not qualify for last month’s presidential debate, have grown since the shooting. Trump himself posted on his social media platform that his third-party rival should receive a security detail “immediately.”

“Given the history of the Kennedy Family, this is the obvious right thing to do!” Trump wrote.

Kennedy said last year the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, informed him that his request for protection had been rejected after Mayorkas determined it wasn’t warranted. The agency is authorized to protect “major” presidential candidates within 120 days of the general election, a mark that was crossed last week.

Kennedy’s father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968 while he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.

Trump was grazed by a bullet in the right ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, by a shooter who also killed one rally goer and wounded two others. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said the lone-wolf attack was carried out from an open rooftop by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot and killed on the scene.

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