Secret Service warns of sharp rise in threat levels ahead of rescheduled White House Correspondents' Dinner

Days ahead of the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Dinner, taking place Friday night, Secret Service officials warned nationwide threats have reached an unprecedented level — with agents opening roughly 10,000 protective intelligence cases since January, a nearly 40% increase from the same period last year.

"The numbers are numbers that this agency and certainly I have never seen in my 24-year career," U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran said Wednesday.

Officials who briefed reporters also said the agency has carried out nearly 10 times as many mental health-related interventions involving those making threats to protected individuals or venues, compared to last year.

Secret Service officials attributed the uptick to a combination of online threats, lone actors, ideological grievances, foreign threats and cases involving mental-health concerns.

"The environment has become very volatile, and that's just across the board," Curran said. He added, "The threat picture and environment is as large as I've ever seen it."

Curran defended the security plan used at the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where an armed individual was stopped at a screening checkpoint outside the event.

"We have to start and end our perimeter somewhere," Curran said. "If it were up to me, I'd love to end it at the bridge, but that's going to inconvenience a lot of people."

"We do expect bad people to show up," Curran said. "It's just a reality of where we are."

"We do expect things to happen at the magnetometers, unfortunately, but that's why they are there. And that's where it happened, and that's where it ended. So it did work. The system worked."

"I don't think it's any secret that it's been in the media that Iran has publicly said they want to kill President Trump," Quinn said.

Asked how concerned the agency is about drones, Quinn responded: "Very."

"The threat's real," he said. "We look at Ukraine. We look at just basic intelligence. It's a matter of time before it comes to the United States."

"The threat continues to get tougher and tougher," Quinn said, citing fiber-optic-controlled and "dark" drones. "It's a constant chase to keep up with it."

Curran said counter-drone assets travel with the president, and some of the systems have been used on American soil for the first time.

"We will use anything and everything," Curran said. "There's nothing that we aren't willing to do."

Quinn acknowledged that the agency previously failed to provide the appropriate level of counter-drone resources when Trump was a former president.

"At that time, a former president wasn't getting the resources that they potentially should have been getting," Quinn said. "I just own it for the Secret Service. That's not happening anymore."