Ex-colleagues say former Secret Service officer’s book attacking Hillary Clinton rings untrue

The book portrays Hillary Clinton as erratic and uncontrollable, a volatile first lady.

But its author, Gary Byrne, a Secret Service agent during the Clinton administration, has rankled his former colleagues, who are denouncing his assertions as false and arguing that Byrne has a political agenda centred on disparaging Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

“There is no place for any self-moralising narratives, particularly those with an underlying motive,” the board of directors of the Association of Former Agents of the US Secret Service wrote in a statement Tuesday.

The public condemnation of the book was an extraordinary move by the group, which has largely remained out of the political fray since its founding in the 1970s.

Critics of the book, Crisis in Character, have noted that Byrne, who served as a uniformed Secret Service officer, the lowest level of security at the White House, would not have had the close access to the Clintons that protective agents do.

“Operationally, one who has the working knowledge of how things are done there would realise that certain of those statements do not coincide with the operational plan,” Jan Gilhooly, the group’s president and a former Secret Service agent, told Politico.