The agent who attacked a superior in the vice president’s security force has been identified as Michelle Herczeg, an Air Force veteran and former Dallas police officer who left the force in 2016 after accusing a superior of sexual malfeasance and subsequently saw her damages suit dropped in 2021. On Monday, she reportedly “snapped.”
RealClearPolitics has produced a comprehensive summary of Monday morning’s events:
Herczeg showed up at the terminal and began acting erratically, grabbing another senior agent’s personal phone and deleting applications on it, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The other agent, a shift leader, was able to recover his phone and then acted as if nothing had happened.
But Herczeg’s bizarre behavior didn’t stop. She then began mumbling to herself, hid behind curtains, and started throwing items, including menstrual pads, at an agent, telling him that he would need them later to save another agent and telling her peers that they were “going to burn in hell and needed to listen to God,” a source told RealClearPolitics.
Herczeg also screamed at the special agent in charge (SAIC), rattling off the names of female officers on the vice president’s detail and claiming they would show up and help her and allow her to continue working. At that point, other agents on the scene believed Herczeg was suffering from a mental lapse, and the superior officer, SAIC, approached her to tell her she was relieved from the assignment.
“That’s when she snapped entirely,” one source recounted.
Herczeg then chest-bumped and shoved her superior, then tackled him and punched him. The agents involved in restraining Herczeg were especially concerned because she still had her gun in the holster. They wrestled her to the ground, took the gun from her, cuffed her, and then removed her from the terminal.
How Herczeg came to be in the vice president’s employ after such an experience is an open question, as security for the president and those in his orbit are expected to have spotless backgrounds and years of experience. It’s fair to wonder if the Secret Service’s signing on to the 30×30 initiative, a pledge to have 30 percent of all law enforcement women by 2030, could have forced the qualification of Herczeg when her record was below the level expected of male officers.
The Left, for all its fearmongering about white supremacists and January 6 rioters lurking in ponds and mulberry bushes, does not take seriously just how dangerous the world is. Anyone who understands the number of unwell and hostile entities in the world and has any status at all would think it best to surround himself with excellent protection, regardless of the color or genitalia of his security. But the president and vice president think signaling their virtue through manning, however unqualified and distracted the component parts of their security might be, is the best course for their purposes.
Politics at the expense of personal safety is astonishingly foolish. As we’re stuck with Joe and Kamala until at least January 2025, the American public should insist on the president and his team protecting themselves — the upheaval of injury to either could very well be a world-changing event. May Monday’s relatively bloodless episode be a lesson, resulting in the reprioritization of merit over optics.