Joe Biden's Dog Attacking Secret Service Again Raises Questions

News that Joe Biden's pet dog has bitten another Secret Service agent has prompted seemingly unfounded speculation on social media that it was responding to canine intuition about the protective agency's loyalties to the president.

CNN reported on Tuesday that 2-year-old German shepherd Commander had bitten an agent while it was at the White House a day earlier—the eleventh known incident of its kind involving the dog.

A Secret Service spokesperson confirmed to Newsweek that the incident had occurred around 8 p.m. on Monday evening and that "the officer was treated by medical personnel on complex."

Among the confirmed incidents, in November 2022 an officer was hospitalized after Commander clamped its jaws around their arms and thighs. In July, White House officials said that the Biden family were working with the agency on new training for the family pet and designated areas within the grounds for it to be unleashed.

Commander is one of several German shepherds the Bidens have owned, who also have Major. In March 2021, the then 3-year-old, a rescue animal, bit a Secret Service officer, resulting in a "minor injury."

"Two separate Biden dogs have bitten various Secret Service officers. I trust the dogs on this," Leah McElrath, an internet personality, wrote. "Maybe the Secret Service needs to take a closer look at the officers involved."

"Anyone who has ever owned a dog knows how intuitive they are," Steven Senski, a podcaster and film commentator, tweeted. "If *two* different dogs (Major and Commander) bite *only* Secret Service agents, they are detecting a threat. Trust dogs."

Meanwhile, other social media users went even further, suggesting that Commander's errant behavior was a reaction to perceived distrust of the Secret Service's loyalties.

"Notice how our goodest boy only goes after [January 6] insurrectionists?" Lindy Li, an American political commentator and Democratic advisor, alleged, despite no Secret Service agents as yet facing any charges over the uprising on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. "Our pups always know."

Meanwhile, Jonathan Goldman, a TV producer, wrote: "The Secret Service deleted their [January 6] texts. Trust the dog."

When approached by Newsweek, a Secret Service spokesperson did not comment on the accusations around agents' loyalty to the president.

In 2022, during a House of Representatives committee investigation the January 6 uprising, the Office of the Inspector General was given only a handful of texts exchanged between Secret Service agents around the time of the incident, claiming that many of the communications that day had been deleted.

An internal Secret Service probe reportedly found that 10 personnel there on the day had sent messages between one another which had since been wiped.

An agency spokesperson told Newsweek at the time that it began resetting its mobile phones to factory settings in January 2021 as part of a planned three-month system migration "before any inspection was opened."

However, the lack of prescience to keep the records was treated by some as suspicious.

In December, a book about the Biden White House claimed that the president had a "discomfort with his Secret Service detail" and suspected some were "MAGA sympathizers."

It also suggested Biden "wasn't buying the details" of the context in which his dog Major bit an agent, supposedly insisting that "somebody was lying."