The photo was instantly legendary: former President Trump with his fist in the air, blood seeping from his right ear and an American flag flying overhead.
Sean Curran was a mostly anonymous U.S. Secret Service agent that July day in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a bullet clipped Mr. Trump’s ear, coming within inches of his skull. In the photo, Curran is the agent on the right, sunglassed and unsmiling, after he and his team sprang to the former president’s side to protect him.
“Part of me probably still hasn’t processed it. I haven’t — from that day to now — I haven’t stopped,” Curran told CBS News in his first news interview. “I felt like I couldn’t let him out of my sight. Not to the point where I’d be overworked, but to a point where I felt like I needed to be with him to ensure that things were done the way I needed them to be done. I didn’t want to leave his side. I think he probably didn’t want me to leave his side, either.”
Evan Vucci / AP
His relationship with the president was forged over seven years of near daily contact, including two assassination attempts and court hearings that numbered “too many to count.” “I mean we — it’s life-changing,” Curran said. Just after his second inauguration, Mr. Trump named him director of the Secret Service.
Curran declined to reveal what Mr. Trump said on the way to and from the courthouse or during his arraignments — or on any occasion — other than to say Trump remained calm “every single day, and that’s on and off camera.”
The Secret Service made some preliminary plans for how to accommodate Mr. Trump if he were convicted in his four criminal trials and ultimately sentenced to prison time.
“We had serious conversations about it, and I at one point told him, he and I might be — getting a lot closer,” Curran said, which drew a chuckle from a couple staffers in his office with him on the 8th floor of Secret Service headquarters.
But Curran was serious. “Look, if it came to it, I’d be sitting right next to him,” he said. “That’s how much I care for him. That’s how much I felt that he deserved the level of protection that any of our protectees should get. There’s nothing I would have not done for him.”
Two federal cases against Trump were dropped during the post-election transition. A conviction in New York resulted in no jail time. Decisions about Mr. Trump’s security would have been made by then-Acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe.
“I think we would have treated [prison] probably like a site, and we would have had to probably own a certain portion of that facility,” Curran said. “It’s still a law, you know, whether someone is in prison or not. The law still dictates that we have to protect them.”
Curran, who grew up in New Jersey, joined the Secret Service in 2001. He was assigned to then-Sen. Barack Obama as part of the Secret Service’s dignitary protection division, then to Obama’s presidential protection detail. Curran was recognized as special agent of the year in 2007. After a stint working for the assistant director of investigations, he was promoted to run the Secret Service coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign, and later, the protective intelligence squad. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Curran became deputy supervisor on Trump’s detail, then, in 2021, one of the youngest special agents ever to be named agent in charge.
When his first term ended, Trump was persona non grata politically, and the Secret Service senior leadership team was focused on protecting then-President Biden. According to other agents familiar with the situation, headquarters essentially told Curran to build a post-presidential protective detail on his own.
As the controversial former president geared up for his third White House campaign, Curran and his deputy, Matt Piant, tried to warn headquarters that they couldn’t treat Mr. Trump like a regular former president. They believed a typical protective footprint, like the bands of security provided to former presidents Obama or Clinton, wouldn’t be enough to accommodate Mr. Trump’s schedule as he dashed between campaign rallies and court hearings.
Curran wouldn’t talk about the failures at Butler, or what happened in the minutes after the shooting. But he suggested that too many leaders have lost touch with officers and agents out in the field.
“Good ideas, big ideas, have been hampered by people with probably less experience,” Curran said, adding hat leaders in a higher position don’t always understand the reality of teams in the field. “I understand what people on the ground need.”
One recent change within the agency’s ranks has been to embed a team of six lawyers within Secret Service field operations — not for oversight of the officers, but for support in dealing with protesters or other circumstances.
At a time when DOGE is cutting agencies it considers bloated, Curran is seeking a larger congressional appropriation. He said it is unclear whether Elon Musk will try to cut staff from the Secret Service. So far, there’s no indication of that.
Curran disagrees with a goal set by former director Kimberly Cheatle to make the Secret Service a 30% female workforce by 2030 – part of a nationwide campaign to diversify the ranks of law enforcement. “When you highlight a specific group or person, you are not going to get the best qualified candidates,” he said, echoing Trump’s move away from diversity, equity and inclusion or “DEI” initiatives. “My only goal is to put the right people on the field and get the best qualified applicants for this job, no matter what the position is and no matter what they look like.”
Richard Giuditta, a New Jersey lawyer brought in by Curran as a legal adviser, said one of Curran’s first actions, within hours of being appointed director, was to go to the uniformed division’s midnight-shift roll call at the White House. “Quietly, by himself,” Giuditta said.
In a break with agency precedent, Giuditta is the first political appointee to serve as senior adviser to the Secret Service.
Not everyone inside the agency is certain Curran is the right guy for the job — field agents aren’t typically chosen to lead the Secret Service and its more than 8,000-member workforce.
“I think overall, people see who I am,” Curran said. “They see that I’m out there. They see that I just had a vest on a month ago, and I’m now up here. If you look around historically, that is not what you’ve seen up here. I’ve taken a different path. People know that. People are probably scared of that, because I’m the unknown.”
Curran, who has been at Mr. Trump’s side on the golf course, on and off planes, in and out of meetings, recognizes that his relationship with Trump may be fodder for critics.
“He has always shown respect to not only me, but the division that protected him,” Curran said. “We have a bond, probably for life.”
Any president chafes at restrictions on their freedom of movement, although Curran declined to name any specific incidents. “If I could broadly speak on this, he and I have had a lot of those tough conversations,” he said. “He was always very respectful of my opinion and what we needed to do, and he never once pushed back.”
The moment in Butler, Pennsylvania — and the photos — made Curran a public figure overnight. His face is now plastered on book covers, billboards, t-shirts, tattoos.
Curran would prefer to not be recognized. “I’m a private guy,” he said. “This position by nature — our role is to kind of be in the shadows. We are not to be part of the picture. Pun intended, I guess.”
Last week, Curran got a phone call from a former Secret Service agent who, perhaps more than anyone, understood that unwanted spotlight. Clint Hill, 93, was best known for leaping onto the back of President John F. Kennedy’s limousine after the president was shot. Hill died on Friday, just one day after reaching out to Curran.
“I guess he feels like we had a connection,” Curran said. “So he wanted to talk to me. That was that.”
