James Murray, the assistant director of the office of protective operations at the U.S. Secret Service, will be taking the reins at the agency after the outgoing director’s resignation.
“United States Secret Service director Randolph ‘Tex’ Alles has done a great job at the agency over the last two years, and the President is thankful for his over 40 years of service to the country,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters in a statement Monday. “Mr. Alles will be leaving shortly and President Trump has selected James M. Murray, a career member of the USSS, to take over as director beginning in May.”
Alles, a retired Marine Corps major general and former acting deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was appointed to lead the Secret Service in April 2017.
CNN reported that Alles “was told two weeks ago there would be a transition in leadership and he was asked to stay on until there was a replacement.” The network added that Secret Service officials were surprised by the news, and that Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to fire Alles.
It was also reported that the move was not related to the breach in which a Chinese national got past two checkpoints into Mar-a-Lago despite not being on the access list to President Trump’s club. A receptionist later called Secret Service to report the breach.
“Secret Service is fantastic. These are fantastic people. And the end result is it was good. I think probably will see what happened, where she’s from, who she is, but the result is they were able to get her and she’s now suffering the consequences of whatever it is she had in mind,” Trump told reporters last week. “But I would say I could not be happier with Secret Service. Secret Service has done a fantastic job from day one. Very happy with them.”
Murray joined the Secret Service in 1995, first working as a special agent in New York. He was named acting special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Washington, D.C., Field Office in May 2015 and later appointed to the permanent role.