A five-year Secret Service veteran on Vice President JD Vance's protective detail has been stripped of his clearance and placed on leave amid a criminal inquiry into leaks that exposed the VP's travel plans to a left-leaning network.
The Secret Service confirmed this week that a member of the Vice Presidential Protective Division is under both an administrative investigation and a potential criminal inquiry for what the agency describes as "compromising operational and information security." The agent has been identified in multiple reports as Tomas Escotto, who had served with the Secret Service for five years before his access to agency facilities and systems was revoked.
The case traces back to a July 15 report by MS Now, the rebranded MSNBC streaming outlet, which cited anonymous agents complaining about Vance family travel. The story detailed a planned Marine Two helicopter flight that would have carried Vance and his young son to a golf lesson at Joint Base Andrews, a trip that was ultimately scrapped, along with a house-hunting excursion in the Washington area. According to the outlet, agents grumbled about canceled days off and government resources burned on personal errands. CNN reported the story infuriated officials at the Secret Service, the FBI and the White House, all angry that operational details about a sitting vice president's movements had landed in print.
A White House official did not mince words. The leaks of Vance's movements were "treasonous," the official said, adding that the vice president and his family were unsettled by what the disclosures suggested about the reliability of their own protective detail. That is not a small complaint. The entire premise of executive protection rests on the assumption that the people guarding a principal do not sell out his schedule to reporters.
The break in the case came from an unlikely source: James O'Keefe's O'Keefe Media Group. An operative posing as a romantic interest of Escotto's got him on hidden camera and, according to screenshots the group published, exchanged messages in which Escotto allegedly shared sensitive photos of Vance's location along with upcoming travel plans. Whatever one thinks of O'Keefe's methods, the footage gave investigators something concrete to work with, and the Secret Service moved fast once it surfaced, yanking Escotto's clearance and opening a formal inquiry.
That timeline matters. It means the same information reportedly making its way to a network hostile to this administration was also, apparently, being shared with a private citizen the agent was trying to impress. Neither is a defensible reason for a protective agent to disclose the vice president's whereabouts. Both point to the same underlying failure: judgment.
What the agent could face
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement that the matter now involves "a potential criminal inquiry." Federal agents who disclose protected law enforcement information can face charges ranging from unauthorized disclosure of government records to, depending on how the information was obtained and transmitted, computer-related offenses under statutes like 18 U.S.C. 1030. Prosecutors have not announced charges, and Escotto has not been publicly named as a defendant in any filing. The Secret Service has not detailed what discipline, if any, follows an administrative finding, and no attorney for Escotto has issued a public response as of this writing.
MS Now has not confirmed or denied that Escotto was a source for its July 15 story, and the network did not respond to requests referenced in other outlets' reporting. The attribution linking Escotto specifically to that report, rather than solely to the O'Keefe video, rests on the timing and substance overlap first reported by outlets including the Washington Examiner, and it should be read with that caveat.
Vance himself has not commented publicly on the individual agent. But the episode lands at a moment when trust in federal law enforcement's political neutrality is already a live issue on the right, and an agent entrusted with a vice president's physical safety allegedly trading that trust for a date's attention, or a reporter's byline, is the kind of story that writes its own headline. The Secret Service says the review is ongoing. Whether it ends in criminal charges will say a great deal about how seriously Washington still takes the people whose job is to keep its leaders alive.
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