A FOIA Release, Forty-Five Pages Long
The Black Vault, a transparency site run by researcher John Greenewald Jr., filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law that lets members of the public compel release of federal records, asking the U.S. Secret Service how it had handled an unusual candidate for federal protection. On December 9, 2024, the agency answered with 45 pages of Protective Intelligence Division correspondence and threat assessments covering 2023 and 2024, concerning Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign.
The release is tied to a specific trigger. On May 24, 2023, Kennedy’s campaign formally requested Secret Service protection, citing a 67-page risk assessment it had commissioned from a private security firm. That report itself is not part of the released pages. It exists in the record only as something Kennedy later described in public, not as a document the Secret Service turned over.
What the Threat Assessments Describe
Inside the 45 pages, Protective Intelligence Division material lays out specific threat sources. One document describes a person who sent Kennedy repeated emails saying he would “suffer” and that they intended to “bury” him. Another describes someone whose letters had first gone to President Biden, incoherent in content, before that person’s attention shifted toward Kennedy’s campaign events. Neither individual is named in the release.
The documents sit beside, without spelling out, an obvious piece of family history: Kennedy’s uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963, and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968 while himself running for president. The FOIA pages do not connect the threat descriptions to that history in so many words.
The Criteria, and the Denial
According to the released material, USSS and the Department of Homeland Security evaluated Kennedy’s request against standing eligibility guidelines: a candidate should be polling at 15% or higher nationally for 30 consecutive days, actively campaigning on a national scale, and facing credible threats, with protection granted more than a year before a general election treated as the exception rather than the rule. Kennedy’s polling moved close to that line without holding above it for the required stretch.
Nothing in the release disputes that the threats described in the Protective Intelligence Division’s own assessments were credible. The denial, as the paperwork frames it, rested on the polling and timing criteria, not on doubt about the threats themselves. Protection was granted in July 2024, after President Biden directed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to arrange it, in the days following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024.
Where the Procedural Explanation Holds, and Where It Doesn’t
Taken at face value, the 2023 denial was a criteria decision, not a verdict on whether Kennedy was actually in danger. That distinction appears in the agency’s own framing and deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as cover. The Protective Intelligence Division treated the threats as real. The case against protection turned on numbers and timing, not on the threats themselves.
What the release does not show is whether officials weighed those criteria against the specific fact of Kennedy’s family history before making the call. It also does not show whether the July 2024 reversal followed any new or updated threat assessment, or whether it was a political decision, made at the president’s request, made apart from any fresh intelligence. Both readings are consistent with what has been released. Neither is confirmed by it.
What the Release Does Not Contain
The 45 pages give no exact date for the 2023 denial. The people behind the threatening emails and letters are not identified anywhere in the set. Several attachments that The Black Vault specifically requested are missing from what came back, and Greenewald’s appeal over those missing attachments remained unresolved as of the document’s publication. No decision memo, meeting note, or other internal deliberative record survives in the release to show how the July 2024 reversal was actually reached inside the agency.
These are gaps in the file. They say nothing about what the missing pages contain.
What Was Said About It Afterward
On July 28, 2023, Kennedy posted on social media that his campaign’s 67-page report documented “unique and well established security and safety risks” beyond ordinary death threats. That is Kennedy’s own characterization of a document the Secret Service did not include in its release, not a finding recorded anywhere in the FOIA pages. When protection was finally granted, Kennedy thanked Biden publicly and credited the private security firm, Gavin de Becker and Associates, with having covered his safety for the previous 15 months of the campaign.
The Black Vault, for its part, described the 2023 denial as a decision that “had come under scrutiny.” That is the outlet’s own framing of what the documents show, not language drawn from the Secret Service’s paperwork. The distinction is worth keeping. A FOIA release tells you what an agency wrote down. What came after it, in a tweet or a headline, is commentary on that paperwork, not an addition to it.