Crabb and another officer “were about to go in and talk to the girl Mia pointed out when I was tapped on the shoulder by a subject identifying himself as a member of the Secret Service,” Crabb wrote. By then, the officers knew that the alleged offender was Jenna Bush, and they explained to the agents that they were checking into an allegation that she had used fake identification to buy a drink.
The Secret Service agents did not interfere. Instead, Michael Bolton, a Secret Service supervisor, told Jenna and Barbara, who was also at the bar, what was happening. He then told the police the girls were going to leave. Two days later, the Austin police issued tickets to both girls for Class C misdemeanor violations. Jenna was cited for misrepresentation of age by a minor, Barbara for possession of alcohol by a minor.
It had all started when a waitress became suspicious of the license Jenna handed her. The waitress showed it to Lawrence, who noted that the license had someone else’s name on it. In addition, the photo looked “slightly off.” Lawrence told Jenna she would not be served.
“Whatever,” Jenna said, according to the police report.
Apparently thinking she was older than Jenna, the waitress brought Barbara and two friends three margaritas and three tequila shots. The bartender kept watch to make sure Jenna drank none of them. After other patrons pointed out that Barbara was the same age as Jenna, Lawrence called 911. By the time officers arrived, the tequila shots were gone. Each of the margaritas had been at least “partially consumed,” the police report said. When officer Clifford Rogers asked Jenna for the identification she had used, she handed it over and started to cry.
“She then stated that I do not have any idea what it is like to be a college student and not be able to do anything that other students get to do,” Rogers wrote.
Another officer asked restaurant manager Lawrence what she wanted the police to do with the girls.
“I want them to get into big trouble,” Lawrence said.
Police Chief Stan Knee told the Austin American-Statesman that the unusual thing about the incident was not the way the police handled it, but that they were involved at all.
“Most business establishments usually handle those things themselves,” the chief said. “Once we were notified of the crime, or the potential crime, we felt obligated to make as thorough a report as possible.”
For Barbara, it was a first offense. But two weeks before, on May 16, Jenna had pleaded no contest to possession of alcohol at Cheers Shot Bar on Sixth Street in Austin. In response to the new charge, Jenna on July 6 pleaded no contest to misrepresenting her age. Her driver’s license was suspended for a month. She paid a six-hundred-dollar fine for the infraction at Chuy’s and for the previous charge. She also got three months of deferred adjudication, a form of probation, plus thirty-six hours of community service. She was required to attend an alcohol awareness class. Barbara also pleaded no contest and was sentenced to deferred adjudication. She had to attend alcohol awareness class as well.
After the incident at Chuy’s, Mike Young and John Zapp, the owners of the restaurant, apologized. “Usually, we wouldn’t have handled it the way it was handled,” Young admitted.
While the girls matured in college, they still resented having Secret Service agents around, even though the agents dressed in casual clothes and most people were unaware of their role. Jenna was particularly difficult. She would sometimes purposely try to lose her protection by going through red lights or by jumping into her car without telling agents where she was going. As a result, the Secret Service kept her car under surveillance so agents could follow her—a waste of manpower.
“One night I was working on her detail, and about three-thirty P.M. on a Friday, she steps out of the house all dressed to the nines and hops into her car,” an agent says. “We follow her in our vehicle. She drove to a bar and got there around four-fifteen.”
The bar was across the street from the Verizon Center at 601 F Street NW in D.C., and it turned out the Rolling Stones were playing there that night. Jenna was meeting friends for a party at a private box at the center. Such a public event requires special security arrangements and close to a hundred agents. But, the agent says, Jenna never told her agents.
“So we scrambled,” an agent says. “We’re trying to get guys from the Washington field office, and we’re trying to get guys into the Verizon Center. Whoever invited her to this box had sent emails to all his friends saying, ‘Hey Jenna Bush [now Jenna Bush Hager] is going to be there.’ We had no idea about this. We pulled people in from the Washington field office and said, ‘Dress for the Rolling Stones concert.’”
The agents asked the Verizon Center management for help.
“That’s the beauty of being a Secret Service agent,” the agent says. “Basically, we can go anywhere, show our badge, and say, ‘Listen, here’s what we’ve got going on. Please help us.’ So we said, ‘Listen, Secret Service, got a problem. Can’t tell you who’s going to be here, but somebody important’s going to be here tonight, and we need your help because we didn’t know about it.’ And management at the Verizon Center bent over backward that night and gave us whatever we needed.”
Since the center is private property with its own security force, the agents had to get permission to enter while armed. The center provided a room as an operations center.
Jenna “doesn’t like the protection whatsoever,” says another agent. “The supervisor of her detail was scared of her, because they were afraid that she was going to pick up the phone and call Dad.”
In fact, says the agent, Jenna called her father many times when she wanted the agents to back off. “The president would call the special agent in charge,” the agent says. “The SAIC would call the detail leader, the detail leader would call the guys and say, ‘Hey you’ve got to back off.’”
“How about us doing our jobs?” an agent says. “I mean, what if something happens to her? I think she has a hard time grasping how easy it would be to pick her up, throw her into a van, and next thing you know she’s on Al Jazeera. And we’re out there, we’re trying to do the right thing. And I don’t think she understands it. She definitely didn’t respect what we’re out there trying to do for her.”
At times, Bush chewed out the detail for not following his daughter. One afternoon at the White House, Jenna snuck out a back exit that leads to the Rose Garden, eluding her detail. Bush saw her leave and called the detail leader to complain that she was not being followed.
“She stepped up to the plate and said, ‘Daddy, I didn’t tell them where I was going,’” an agent says.
An agent on the counterassault team accompanied Jenna on a trip to Central and South America.
“She was really getting a hard time in Argentina because the paparazzi were following her around, and she really couldn’t go out and do the things that she wanted to do because of all these cameras following her around,” the agent recalls. “Typically, she would just start complaining [about the Secret Service following her]. She would actually sit in the car and start looking back, trying to pick out the counterassault guys. She would say, ‘Hey those guys are too close.’ Next thing you know, the cell phone rings and it’s the DL, the detail leader, saying, ‘Hey can you guys back off a little bit? She sees you.’”
One detail leader found he could give Jenna instructions, and she would listen.