A former Secret Service agent is speaking out about the time she spent protecting Michelle Obama and revealed the upsetting part of her job was not being able to stop racists from insulting the former First Lady.
Evy Poumpouras served on the presidential protective division for President Barack Obama and the First Lady during their time at the White House.
Poumpouras recalled in her 2020 memoir, “Becoming Bulletproof,” feeling “outraged” when she saw a racist sign directed at the first lady.
“As the first Black First Lady of the United States, Mrs. Obama had to withstand certain kinds of disparagement that none of her predecessors ever faced,” Poumpouras wrote. “I was on her protective detail when we were driving to a school to deliver a speech; we passed someone on a bridge holding up a shockingly racist sign directed at her.”
“I remember feeling outraged — after all, it was part of our job to protect the first family mentally as well as physically. But if the First Lady saw the sign, she gave no indication of it,” Poumpouras added.
The former agent protected George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush during her 12 years in the Secret Service revealed to the Insider that there was no protocol in place for dealing with spoken or written forms of racism.
“I could do nothing,” she said. “There’s freedom of speech in the United States, and even if I personally feel that speech is wrong, the law doesn’t give me the power to take that person’s speech away.”
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