What's The Story With The Secret Service?

July 14, 2024 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is not the kind of event that I would normally write about at Manhattan Contrarian. Like many other newsworthy events, it’s not that it’s not important; it’s that I don’t have any special expertise or insights to offer.

But there is one aspect of this attempted assassination that cries out for comment. That is the truly incredible failure of the Secret Service that enabled the shooter to gain access to the vantage point to shoot.

I don’t claim to have ever been involved in the security business, or to have any particular knowledge about how to secure what they call the “protectee” at a campaign rally or other event. But it certainly does seem obvious to me that among the most important security precautions to be taken, if not the very most important, would be to restrict access to any nearby vantage points from which a would-be assassin could have a clear shot at the target.

If that wasn’t obvious from just thinking about it, there is also the fact that the previous most famous failure of security involving a President turned on exactly this issue. That would be the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In that case, Lee Harvey Oswald was able to get himself a spot on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a clear line of sight at Kennedy’s passing motorcade. The failure to have taken obvious security precautions to secure that site has led to decades of accusations that the intelligence community was somehow involved in planning or facilitating the assassination. After all, could they really have been this stupid?

But actually, the Kennedy assassination presents a much less clear instance of failure of security than does the recent attempt on Trump. On the fateful day in 1963, Kennedy’s motorcade, including the open limousine in which he rode, moved through several blocks of downtown Dallas, passing some dozens of buildings that could have served as a perch for an assassin. Fully securing all of them would understandably have been very difficult. (For that very reason, it would be unthinkable today for a President (or candidate) to move through a downtown area in an open car.).

By contrast, at the Butler, PA, farm show venue where the attempt on Trump’s life took place, Trump was stationary during the rally, and there was only one nearby cluster of buildings that could potentially serve as an assassin’s nest. Here is a map of the Butler site from the BBC website:

 

From Bongino’s X account as quoted at the Daily Signal:

“This is an obviously catastrophic failure and NO excuses should be made, or even attempted,” Bongino posted on X. “The failures are profound and questions must be answered about ground surveillance, air surveillance, post-stander support, and counter-sniper advance work and response. We have ONE job, and we came within inches of a deadly failure today. An uneventful failure is NOT a success.”

If you think that Bongino is too much of an obvious Trump partisan to be objective, then you may be interested in the view of Erik Prince. Prince is known as the founder of the Blackwater firm that has famously provided security services to the U.S. government in some of the most dangerous places in the world.

DJT was not saved by USSS brilliance. The fact that USSS allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150yds to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence. Clearly there was adequate uncontrolled dead space for a shooter to move into position and take multiple aimed shots. . . . In my old business of providing Diplomatic Security in two active war zones we were expected to execute the basics or we would be fired. Clearly USSS failed at the basics of a secure perimeter. . . .

And Prince finds plenty more to criticize in the performance of the Secret Service team:

[O]nce shots were fired their extraction was clumsy and left DJT highly exposed to follow on attacks. It looked like they had never drilled together because those responses should be effectively autonomic.

Prince concludes:

Will there be accountability? That's not the Washington way. Unserious and unworthy people in positions of authority got us to this near disaster.

Is Prince justified in suggesting “malice” as a possibility? Certainly there is a level of failure that makes mere “incompetence” a difficult inference to reach.

In the same vein, note that to this day the Biden/Mayorkas Homeland Security Department continues to refuse Secret Service protection to independent candidate Robert Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy has polled as high as about 15% in some polls (although as low as 4% in others, and at 9.5% in the RealClearPolitics average over the last two weeks. 

Biden polls a few points worse in the 5-way polls that include Kennedy than in head-to-head polls against Trump. Refusing Secret Service protection to Kennedy effectively prevents him from holding big rallies. Is there anything political in the Biden/Mayorkas decision to deny the protection? The alternative hypothesis is that they are just trying to save the taxpayers a little money — something they have shown no inclination to do in any other context for the past three plus years.