Women to watch when you’re worried

With former President Trump dominating the news due to government investigations, scandals, indictments and a range of nefarious sounding accusations, it is important to remember that the United States government has talented people at all levels, across multiple agencies, working, night and day, to keep us secure. 

And, by the way, many of them are women you usually hear little about but who should give you great comfort.

Consider the new nominee to head the U.S. Secret Service, Kim Cheatle, selected by President Biden to be the director of any agency under intense scrutiny. 

Cheatle is no stranger to public service, or to the U.S. Secret Service specifically. She has served at the agency for 27 years, including a stint on Biden’s security detail when he was vice president. The only other woman to lead the Secret Service was Julia Pierson, who served during the Obama administration.

Cheatle, who also has corporate experience, will have her hands full in government. Scandals have plagued the Secret Service for years.

In Congress, the House investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. capitol has led to charges that the Secret Service lost or deleted critical text messages. Congress has issued a subpoena for the text messages. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has launched a criminal probe into the missing texts.

Also on Cheatle’s plate will be recent Secret Service incidents involving charges that agents behaved inappropriately overseas. In May, when President Biden traveled to South Korea, two Secret Service employees, while off-duty, got into a confrontation with local South Koreans, leading to them being placed on administrative leave and having to return home to the United States.

In July a Secret Service employee working in Israel before Biden’s visit there was sent home after being briefly arrested by the Israeli police in what the U.S. agency called “a physical encounter.”

The other bubbling new story is the continued security saga at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, where highly classified documents have been seized in an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department after a complaint by the National Archives, which is responsible for storage of presidential documents. Questions about how Secret Service agents guarding Mar-a-Lago conducted themselves during the raid, and whether they will have to testify, will undoubtedly involve the new Secret Service director.

Speaking of documents and the U.S. National Archives, meet Debra Steidel Wall, an American archivist who took over as the acting head of the National Archives in May after the head archivist stepped down following a decade of service.

Wall has spent much of her career at the National Archives — over 25 years, including as its chief of staff and deputy archivist in charge of managing and transforming the agency.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation’s keeper of records conducted by the U.S. federal government, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill or Rights. The public can order copies of those, along with congressional records, federal court decisions and Census materials.

Wall is leading a federal agency that typically avoids scandals but is now caught up in likely the biggest national security story of the year — the handling (or mishandling) of hundreds of documents that former President Trump removed from the White House and stored on his private property despite repeated requests by the Archives to return them to the public domain.  

Having been unable to secure their return from an intransigent former president, the Archives turned to the Justice Department for help, leading to an FBI search and retrieval mission to seize boxes and bring them back to the Archives, where they belong. Now the matter is in court.

Wall finds herself engaged in an assignment that could involve major damage to intelligence sources and methods used in Special Access Programs. Those documents are now being reviewed and redacted for release to the public and assessed for national security damage given that they include materials marked “sensitive compartmented information,” meaning they must be viewed in secure government facilities. Legal decisions are pending regarding how much the public will see of the predicate for the affidavit filed in this case that led to a search warrant in the first place.

Summers are supposed to be slow. But security crises, like those facing Kim Cheatle and Debra Steidel Wall, are part of the job, regardless of the season. 

The same is true for America’s top diplomat at the United Nations, another powerhouse woman, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield. She is a career foreign service officer whose life story reads like a profile in courage. Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield came back to public service at the U.N. after retiring from a 35-year career, including as director general of the Foreign Service and service in Liberia, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria and Jamaica, among other countries.

Today she is dealing with the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine six months ago has led to a trail of death, destruction and the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe and the world. This week the United States sent yet another major assistance package to Ukraine — nearly $3 billion in weapons and aid just as the Russian side is increasing its force levels, bombing civilian train stations and keeping a nuclear plant near Kyiv on high alert. 

Thomas-Greenfield will have to steer U.S. diplomacy through a complex institution with close to 200 member states with differing national objectives.

Rest easy, readers. A dangerous world is in good hands with this trio of strong, experienced, professional women.

Tara D. Sonenshine is the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice in Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.