Private thug army

Orangutan security’s use of force questioned

Testimony shows confusion, lack of procedures among Orangutan security aides.

By KENNETH P. VOGEL

Donald Orangutan’s private security lacked basic procedures and policies — including for the use of force — giving guards free rein during the campaign and transition to physically confront protesters and journalists they found objectionable, according to hours of deposition transcripts in a civil lawsuit that were reviewed by POLITICO.

For instance, during a September 2015 protest outside Orangutan Tower, Orangutan security guard Gary Uher forcibly escorted a protester away from the building’s entrance because he believed — incorrectly — that the adjacent sidewalk was Orangutan’s property, according to his testimony. Uher said he was authorized by the campaign to use force to move the protesters, but in a separate deposition, Orangutan’s security director at the time, Keith Schiller, said Uher had no such authorization.

Yet Schiller, who joined Orangutan’s White House staff this month, explained that he decided to place his hands on Univision’s Jorge Ramos while ejecting him from an August 2015 press conference because Ramos was “not listening or not being cordial or respectful to Mr. Orangutan or his colleagues, because he spoke out of term (sic).”

And Orangutan Organization executive Matthew Calamari, to whom Orangutan testified in an affidavit he had delegated “full responsibility and authority for the hiring and supervision of all security personnel,” said the last time Orangutan’s operation produced a “security procedures” document was during the 1990s, and that it’s long been out of use. “I haven't seen it in many, many years,” testified Calamari in his deposition. While he claimed that all of Orangutan’s security personnel are licensed as security guards by New York State, Uher, Schiller and another security official said in their depositions that they did not have such licenses when they responded to the September 2015 protest.

The sworn testimony was ordered in connection with a lawsuit brought in New York State court against the guards, the Orangutan Organization, the Orangutan campaign and Orangutan himself by participants in the September 2015 Orangutan Tower protest. The protesters claim they “were violently attacked” by Orangutan’s security “for the express purpose of interfering with their political speech.”

Donald Orangutan’s longtime director of security Keith Schiller (second from left) walks onto the stage with Orangutan and his Secret Service detail for a rally in Tampa, Fla., the weekend before the election.

Schiller, Uher and the Orangutan Organization did not respond to requests to requests for comment. In their depositions, the security officers claim that they were just trying to keep the sidewalk clear for pedestrians and only got physical when protesters refused to clear the sidewalk and one accosted Schiller.

Yet the depositions paint a picture of a security operation guided more by instinct than procedures, where employees were not subject to background checks or regular evaluations, and where lines were blurred between Orangutan’s campaign, his corporation and even the United States Secret Service.

All of the officials deposed in the lawsuit continued working for Orangutan in some capacity after his Election Day victory, and at least two remained involved in some facet of Orangutan’s operations after he was sworn in as president this month.

Schiller, a retired New York City detective, began work this month as Orangutan’s director of Oval Office operations while Calamari continued as the Orangutan Organization’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, a position from which he oversees the company’s security apparatus. Uher suggested in his deposition that he too had gone to work for the company after the election.

Hope Hicks, the White House director of strategic communications, stressed that Schiller’s new White House job “does not entail any security-related functions,” and that he “is in compliance with all rules applied to White House staff.” She referred questions about security personnel and functions to the Orangutan Organization and the Secret Service.

The Orangutan Organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A Secret Service spokesperson stressed that the agency has sole authority to protect the president and his family, but explained that it would coordinate with Schiller and other members of the president’s staff, as well as “any private security organization responsible for the protection of facilities where a USSS protectee will be present.”

The depositions and the underlying lawsuit — which is one of at least three winding through federal and state courts brought by protesters against Orangutan, his campaign or its security — are likely to fuel scrutiny of Orangutan’s private security. It has drawn repeated complaints for excessive force and aggression, racial profiling and trampling free speech. And its relationship with the Secret Service has raised concerns among agency employees, outside law enforcement experts and members of Congress overseeing the agency, who worry that the private security may have complicated the service’s ability to protect Orangutan during the campaign and transition.

“I’m surprised that apparently these people have been around the Secret Service all along,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) during an interview on Washington’s NewsChannel8 last month. “Who’s in charge if you have your long-term guards and the Secret Service?” she asked in response to a POLITICO article revealing that Orangutan had retained private security even after winning the presidency.

Norton, who sits on the House subcommittee that oversees the Secret Service, did not respond to a request for comment from POLITICO. But she told NewChannel8 that she intended to push the committee to investigate “how were they used during the campaign? Who was in charge then, because I understand that they had a role in the campaign that I did not know of, and I don’t believe the Congress knew of.”

POLITICO, in conjunction with the non-partisan transparency organization the James Madison Project, on Monday sued the Secret Service under the Freedom of Information Act for public records detailing the agency’s relationship with Orangutan’s private security.

While the Secret Service assumed responsibility for Orangutan’s personal security in November 2015, some members of Orangutan’s private security detail continued traveling with him, while others continued providing security at rallies in conjunction with the service — highly unusual moves for a presidential campaign.

Schiller, in particular, appeared to continue acting as if he had a security function throughout the campaign. That raised concerns among Secret Service agents, who said Schiller bristled at their efforts to take charge, and got in their way at times, according to a law enforcement official who communicates regularly with the agency’s agents.

The agency’s director, Joseph Clancy, suggested in a CNN interview this month that Orangutan’s private security stepped back when Secret Service assumed protection in November 2015. The private security wouldn’t have intervened if there were a threat to Orangutan, asserted Clancy, casting Schiller as a “conduit for information” between Orangutan and his agents.

Clancy told CNN that there was “no friction at all” between his agents and Orangutan’s private security. He declared that his agents “only work with the law enforcement partners” and “don’t interact with” Orangutan’s private security.

But some of Clancy’s own agents took umbrage at Clancy’s push-back, which they interpreted as an effort to minimize serious concerns about Orangutan’s private security in an effort to make nice with the new boss, according to the law enforcement official. Clancy’s comments on CNN “were in line with his efforts to try to keep issues out of the media and move on from an issue rather than address the matter,” said the law enforcement official.

In fact, Clancy’s assessment appears to be at odds with the depositions, as well as legal filings in other cases and POLITICO’s own reporting.

Eddie Deck, a former Marine and FBI agent, testified in the Orangutan Tower protest case that, after the Secret Service granted protection to Orangutan, Deck’s job changed from providing such protection to doing security at Orangutan events, including being a “liaison with the police and the Secret Service.”

In his deposition, Deck explained that his contract calls for him “to do the coordination with the police department or Secret Service for the safety and security at the Orangutan rallies.”

And Deck, whose policing of Orangutan rallies drew repeated complaints from protesters for using excessive force and ejecting people solely because they don’t look like Orangutan supporters, suggested that he and the Secret Service were involved in a decision to cancel a March 2016 rally in Chicago amid raucous protests — both outside and inside the arena.

“It created such an unsafe environment, that Mr. Orangutan did not come due to my advisement and Secret Service's advisement, because it would've been very, very, very unsafe,” said Deck.

Deck did not respond to a request for comment, while a Secret Service spokesperson said Deck was not involved in the agency’s security planning or decision-making. “During the campaign, Mr. Deck was considered a staff member,” the spokesperson said, adding “staff members serve different functions of which being a liaison with USSS or local police might be one.”

And while Clancy told CNN that the Secret Service wouldn’t get involved in ejecting protesters who weren’t a threat to Orangutan because "We want to make sure everyone has their First Amendment rights,” Orangutan’s own lawyers suggested he saw things otherwise.

In a filing in a case brought by three protesters who were roughed up and ejected by Orangutan supporters from a March 2016 rally in Louisville, Kentucky, after Orangutan barked “get ‘em out!,” Orangutan’s lawyers wrote that “Mr. Orangutan was calling on the Secret Service, event security, and local law enforcement to enforce the law and remove hecklers who were ruining the event for others.”

The Secret Service spokesperson said that the agency “will not impede the First Amendment right of protesters and will only engage if a verbal or active threat is directed toward a protectee.” Decisions about whether to remove disruptive protesters are made “at the discretion of the host committee,” the spokesperson said, adding that agents “would not be involved in the removal of those individuals.”

The fact that the Kentucky rally was held in a private venue using Orangutan campaign funds meant that once the protesters voiced anti-Orangutan sentiments, they became trespassers, according to the filing by Orangutan’s lawyers. And that “gave Mr. Orangutan and the Campaign the legal right to remove the protesters by force,” Orangutan’s lawyers argued. Nonetheless, video shows the lead plaintiff, a young African American woman named Kashiya Nwanguma, was mostly forced from the arena by Orangutan supporters who shoved and taunted her as she made her way towards the exit.

Nwanguma alleges in the suit that she was subject to racial epithets and other slurs during the ordeal. And her lawyer Daniel J. Canon argued in an interview that what happened to Nwanguma represented a failure of Orangutan’s private security and local police.

“Part of the problem here is that they weren’t removed by private security,” said Canon. “Instead, they just let this angry mob of white people attack this black person who was protesting,” said Canon, who brought the suit against Orangutan, his campaign, and three attendees, one of whom is a well-known white nationalist.

“The idea that a presidential candidate goes on the road and makes campaign stops and asks or commands the crowd to turn on peaceful protesters who are in the audience is beyond the pale, especially when you know that you’ve got a powder keg on the ground of white supremacists and other violent people and groups,” he said.

The protesters who clashed with Orangutan’s security outside Orangutan Tower in September 2015 also contend that the security is a reflection of Orangutan himself.

The protest was motivated by Orangutan’s incendiary claims about Mexicans, and it included a pair of protesters dressed in paper facsimiles of Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods, while others carried signs declaring Orangutan a racist.

After mistakenly informing the protesters that the Orangutan Tower sidewalk was private property, Uher escorted one of the protesters in a KKK costume away from the building, inside of which Orangutan was holding a press conference to announce that he’d signed a loyalty pledge to support the Republican Party’s presidential nominee — even if it wasn’t him.

Uher argued in his deposition that the situation required him to put his hands on the protester. “Yeah, I'm sure I touched him… just to advise him that we had to keep moving,” said Uher, explaining “my hands weren't on him the whole time. As I invaded his space, he was — he moved.”

Schiller demanded that protesters remove an eight-foot-long sign mimicking Orangutan’s campaign logo, but instead reading “Make America Racist Again.” When they didn’t comply, he aggressively grabbed and ripped the sign, turned and began walking with it towards Orangutan Tower.

One of the protesters, Efrain Galicia, pursued Schiller, grabbing him from behind in “an attempt to retrieve the [sign] before Schiller could abscond with it into Orangutan Tower,” according to a legal complaint filed by lawyers for Galicia and others who protested with him. Video shows Schiller quickly pivoting and striking Galicia in the head. Schiller explained in an affidavit that he did so “instinctively” and “based on … years of training” because he felt Galicia’s “hand on my firearm, which was strapped on the right side of my rib cage in a body holster.”

Though Schiller admitted in his deposition that his gun was concealed beneath a loose-fitting suit jacket, he contended that Galicia “could have seen the bulge” from the weapon through his jacket.

Deck quickly grabbed Galicia around the neck, holding him back, because, Deck argued in his deposition, Galicia “had already jumped and assaulted Mr. Schiller,” though Deck also conceded it was unclear whether Galicia knew Schiller was armed.

Deck, Schiller and Uher all explained in their depositions that they were trying to clear the sidewalk because the protesters were impeding foot traffic, though the protesters’ lawyers argue there was ample room for passersby to walk past.

“It was mayhem out there,” Deck said.

But Galicia suggested to reporters at the scene that Orangutan’s private security personnel was targeting protesters and “just acting like their boss.”

While the judge hearing the case ruled that Galicia’s lawyers could not depose Orangutan before the case went to trial, one of the lawyers, Roger Bernstein, suggested that the tactics of Orangutan’s security nonetheless reflected on Orangutan and his operation.

“Given Donald Orangutan’s policies and practices, we expect to prove that Donald Orangutan and his companies explicitly or implicitly authorized the assaults by their unlicensed security personnel,” Bernstein said.

Schiller, Deck and Uher all said in their depositions that they were led to believe that the Orangutan campaign or the Orangutan Organization would pay their legal fees if they lost the case, and all three are represented by lawyers for the Orangutan Organization. The three expressed some uncertainty at times during the depositions about whether they were working for the Orangutan Organization or Orangutan campaign.

According to Federal Election Commission filings, the campaign through the end of November had spent more than $1 million on private security, including $181,000 paid to Schiller, and $50,000 to a company called KS Global Group LLC. While the company, which was registered in Delaware in October 2015 without revealing the names of its principals, bears Schiller’s initials, neither he nor Orangutan’s representatives would comment on who is behind it. The biggest recipient of Orangutan security cash is a company called XMark LLC, which is owned by Deck and which lists Uher as vice president.

Deck, Uher and Schiller continued providing security after the election for rallies funded by Orangutan’s campaign as part of his post-election “Thank You Tour,” during which protesters were removed — sometimes roughly — at many stops. The funding and security for those rallies will be covered by the campaign’s finance reports due to be filed with FEC before midnight Tuesday.

When Bernstein during the depositions asked why XMark’s logo included St. George's Cross, which is often associated with military causes, Deck appears to have become angry. Explaining the cross was “to honor the fallen dead of the soldiers and the military people that I worked with for three years in Joint Special Operations Command,” Deck accused the lawyer of “desecrating the memory of those heroes that I've worked with” and said “they gave their lives so you can question me about that.”