“In my more than 40-year career, I’ve never been put in the position of being a decoy,” says Alex Brandon, chief White House photographer for The Associated Press. “Wild. Just wild.”
Now, this isn’t unprecedented. Bobby McDonald, who served as a Secret Service agent from 1995-2015, discusses in the doc how then-President Bill Clinton took a secret plane (leaving a decoy) during a high-risk visit to Pakistan in 2000. And, in a statement to the filmmakers, a White House official said, “The United States Secret Service’s core mission is protecting the President, which they achieved.”
What they did not achieve, Slattery contends, was conveying strength.
“It I think has become a bit of a symbol about the degree to which this war has gotten to a place that the White House has not wanted or did not anticipate,” he says in the film. “Being in a catering van due to threats from Iran does not project power, it does not project control, and they know that.”
