A man arrested with a gun near President Trump’s Los Angeles golf club allegedly kept notebooks detailing the First Lady’s daily schedule, hundreds of pages on Secret Service agents, and sketches of the course, prosecutors revealed at a preliminary hearing, according to the New York Post.
Jeanine John Taele, 38, a decorated Marine veteran from Downey, California, appeared before Judge John Lonergan in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, dressed in a suicide smock. Prosecutors said Taele had 208 pages of drawings and sketches of the golf course, lists of Secret Service schedules, details on individual security members, and copies of Melania Trump’s schedule, along with research on “going off the grid.” He was found mentally unfit to stand trial, and his bail was revoked until his next court appearance on Sept. 9.
Judge Lonergan called the allegations “alarming in this day and age with the violence that is creeping into our everyday lives especially with the partisanship with the political climate.”
Federal agents first spotted Taele at the club on July 31 while assessing security ahead of Trump’s Aug. 4 visit, prosecutors said, allegedly walking the course wearing an earpiece and photographing agents’ security-planning activities. He returned Aug. 2 and falsely claimed to work for the State Department on a security detail, then admitted having a loaded firearm in his truck. Deputies detained him after learning he was wanted in an unrelated robbery case; a pat-down turned up a 16-round magazine of hollow-point ammunition, and a search of his truck found a loaded 9mm pistol, more hollow-point rounds, binoculars, and a badge reading “security protection agent.”
A search of Taele’s Downey home turned up an illegally modified AR-style rifle, additional firearms, body armor, high-capacity magazines, communications equipment, and seven notebooks of surveillance logs. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said “anyone with that amount of firepower around the President poses a serious threat,” calling the alleged conduct “not normal behavior.”
Taele is separately charged federally with possessing an unregistered short-barreled rifle, a charge carrying up to 10 years in prison. He served in the Marine Corps from 2008 to 2016, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He pleaded not guilty to four state charges — including felony second-degree robbery tied to an unrelated November 2025 incident — at his Aug. 4 arraignment.