The last time Secret Service agents accompanied an elected US official to face criminal charges, they were forced – for hours – to keep their mission a secret even from their own bosses.

It was October 10, 1973, and few of the agents knew what kind of story they would make by securing Vice President Spiro Agnew’s appearance in a federal courtroom to plead guilty and resign.

“It was a big day for the country and a sad day,” Jerry Parr, one of those agents, said in a 2010 interview. “And we didn’t tell anyone that it was happening. For good and for bad.” Parr, who joined the Secret Service in 1962, didn’t know what to expect when, a decade later, he was asked to become Agnew’s deputy head of security.

Agnew’s first signs of serious legal trouble came in August 1973, when the Maryland attorney general told him he was under investigation for taking bribes as governor.

It didn’t take long for the news of the investigation to dominate the front pages of newspapers.

Parr’s job would be to escort Agnew to the federal courthouse in Baltimore, an assignment that his superior asked to be kept secret.

After Agnew retires, the Secret Service will urgently need to dispatch agents to protect the speaker of the House of Representatives, next in line for the presidency. Such a move would attract the attention of journalists. Agnew did not want the news to leak before his resignation was made official and asked his team to keep it a secret.

Agnew’s resignation was announced by his lawyer, and the former vice president was quick to declare that he had no objection to the $29,500 in federal taxes not being paid in 1967. In return, federal prosecutors declined to bring much more serious allegations of bribery, racketeering, and conspiracy.

Attorney General Elliott Richardson argued that the leniency was justified because of the “historic scale” of Agnew’s resignation and felony conviction. The judge ultimately agreed with the attorney general, giving Agnew a three-year suspended sentence and ordering him to pay a $10,000 fine.

No secret this time: The Secret Service is expected to extradite former President Donald Trump to a New York court on Tuesday to face charges related to paying $130,000 to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Daniels would not have spoken publicly about her affair with Trump a decade earlier.

Source: Associated Press.