DAN MCLAUGHLIN reveals all the woeful Secret Service warning signs that may now prove the attempted Trump assassination was a security disaster waiting to happen
The Secret Service has some explaining to do.
How did an assassin with a rifle get onto the roof of a building a little over 100 yards away from Donald Trump’s podium at Saturday’s rally? It’s supposed to be standard operating procedure for the Secret Service to clear roofs and windows with a clean line of sight at someone they’re protecting.
Yet it appears that Thomas Crooks, the alleged assassin, was up there alone. Nobody secured the roof. And rallygoers - who spotted him moments before his attack - told a BBC reporter that they were brushed aside when they tried to warn security agents.
Now we know that Trump was just inches from death. He was incredibly lucky to only be winged on the ear. If not for the wind, a slight tilt of his head, and poor marksmanship by the 20-year-old shooter, America would be facing a traumatic national tragedy of unthinkable proportions.
It’s already a personal tragedy, as one rallygoer behind Trump was killed and two others seriously wounded.
Donald Trump was shot in the ear during an attempted assassination on Saturday at a Pennsylvania rally
For the Trump family, Melania and Barron had to endure watching as their husband and father respectively almost died before their eyes.
Incompetence in this business gets people killed - ruins lives.
There may also be after-action reviews of why the agents standing around Trump’s podium didn’t move faster to block him and get him offstage. But those are split-second decisions. And on the whole, the bravery of those who dashed to protect the former president is admirable indeed.
Not preventing this in advance, however, is inexcusable.
The questions abound:
Was Trump’s detail too understaffed to do their job? Has his security been compromised? Can we trust that future rallies will be secure? What are the implications for next week’s Republican party convention?
Pennsylvania congressman Mike Waltz, who was at the rally, tweeted after that ‘very reliable sources’ were ‘telling me there have been repeated requests for stronger secret service protection for President Trump’ that were, he alleged, denied by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. But a Secret Service spokesman responded quickly that it was ‘absolutely false’ that ‘a member of the former President’s team’ had made such a request.
A House investigation is now essential.
On Saturday, the Republican Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee demanded Secretary Mayorkas’s cooperation in a thorough probe of the Secret Service.
Secret Service personnel escorted a defiant Trump into a vehicle after he was injured
Republicans can expect little help from Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security committee, who introduced legislation in April in an attempt to strip Trump of his protective detail.
One of Thompson’s aides, Jacqueline Marsaw, penned a despicable Facebook post on Saturday night saying she wished the shooter hadn’t missed Trump.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service continues to deny protection to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father and uncle were assassinated. Shame on them.
The Secret Service is one of America’s most respected institutions, revered for its cool professionalism and the selfless bravery of agents who put themselves, literally, in the line of fire.
But as we have seen with so many other once-great institutions in recent years, its reputation has long outlived the reality. We just saw how easily the Secret Service’s decline could threaten the very fabric of our society.
It’s an open secret in Washington. The service has endured years of bad press for a culture of boozy agents frequenting prostitutes, neglecting digital security risks and acting inappropriately. More recently, Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle has been criticized for emphasizing diversity in hiring – possibly watering down standards as a result.
That controversy exploded into view after an incident in April this year when Michelle Herczeg, a female agent on vice president Kamala Harris’s detail, began acting erratically, had an apparent mental break, and ended up in a scuffle with other armed agents. Herczeg was a former Dallas cop who left that job in 2016 after accusing a superior of sexual misconduct – a charge that she pursued with a damages lawsuit that was then dismissed by a court in 2021.
There has yet to be a clear answer for why, after such an incident, she was placed on Harris’s team.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was shot dead by U.S. Secret Service just seconds after the bullet clipped the former president's ear
Reckless driving incidents have also plagued the VP’s detail. In October 2022, Harris had to be moved to another vehicle after her SUV hit a curb so hard it briefly became airborne. The Secret Service misreported the incident as a ‘mechanical failure’, and the agent who was driving was granted a waiver from the usual requirement of having to take a defensive driving course.
The agency hasn’t covered itself in glory in recent investigations, either. It was in hot water for deleting messages sought by Congress in the January 6 investigation.
It somehow couldn’t figure out who brought cocaine into the Biden White House last summer.
It issued a vague denial of reports that agents had visited the gun dealer who sold a revolver to Hunter Biden in 2018 (the one that led to his recent conviction for lying on a federal firearms-purchase form) and attempted to retrieve the purchase paperwork. Yet the dealer told the FBI both the Secret Service and local Delaware police had visited his business the day after Hunter made the illegal purchase.
Not all of the agency’s recent humiliations have been its own doing, from a drunk driver hitting a parked SUV in Joe Biden’s motorcade in December to repeated incidents of agents being bitten by Biden’s dog Commander.
But keeping an assassin from setting up a platform with a clear line of sight to take a potshot at a former president? That’s their job. They failed it big time.
