Nine years ago, a watchdog in Congress pointed out the Secret Service’s failures that may have made the assassination attempt on Donald Trump possible.
Now the watchdog is demanding the resignation of agency chief Kimberly Cheatle on the day she testifies before Congress.
In 2015, the House Oversight Committee released a damning 200-page report on the United States Secret Service (USSS), describing an agency “in crisis” with “systemic mismanagement,” chronic underfunding, a “grossly inefficient hiring process,” and “many employees [who] ‘have no confidence in the agency’s leadership’.
Tristan Leavitt, the report’s author and a former top Oversight official who now heads a whistleblower organization, told DailyMail.com that the Trump shooting shows that those same problems still exist today.
“Nearly a decade later, it appears the Secret Service is still struggling with the same problems it did a decade ago,” said Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight.
“Whether Director Cheatle resigns or is fired, she should be replaced by a director from outside the agency who can clean house from top to bottom.
The House Committee on Oversight calls for the resignation of Kimberly Cheatle, the agency’s chief, after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump
Trump was hit in the ear by a bullet while speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, over the weekend
Leavitt pointed to reports that security at Trump’s rally last weekend in Butler, Pennsylvania, was left to possibly inexperienced or undertrained local police anti-sniper teams rather than undercover units. There was also evidence of likely poor communication between local police and the USSS.
Leavitt’s 2015 report pointed out previous stunning failures in presidential security. In 2014, for example, officials allowed then-President Barack Obama into an elevator with an armed guard. Obama had three criminal records, including the shooting of a fleeing car with a child inside.
The man later managed to slip through the agents and into Obama’s security formation.
The report detailed a March 2015 incident in which “two intoxicated senior USSS officials—including a senior member of the President’s security detail—interfered with a bomb threat scene just outside the White House grounds.”
“As bad as those and other details were, they were merely symptoms of a much larger collapse of the USSS,” Leavitt said. “It is clear that their leadership has not learned its lessons and that a massive overhaul is still needed.”
While in Cartagena, Colombia, for a presidential visit in April 2012, 13 agents brought prostitutes back to their hotel rooms. After the scandal came to light that month, four agents were fired, five resigned, and one retired.
In September 2014, a veteran with PTSD jumped the White House fence with a knife and entered the building’s front door.
Omar Gonzalez was subdued by security after bursting through the front door of the White House and entering the East Room of the Capitol.
An investigation found that security at the external border was not communicating effectively with agents on the inside. Then-Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigned the following month.
Omar Gonzalez was subdued by security after bursting through the front door of the White House in 2014 and reaching the East Room of the Capitol
Leavitt pointed to reports that security at Trump’s Saturday rally was left to possibly inexperienced or undertrained anti-sniper teams from local police rather than the best units of the USSS.
Leavitt’s 2015 report, written after a year-long investigation, stated that it was “abundantly clear that the USSS is in crisis.”
“As the USSS mission has grown, its personnel have had to do more with less. USSS faces a personnel crisis that may be the single greatest threat to the agency,” the report said.
The agency blamed the move in part on a “grossly inefficient hiring process that overloads the Secret Service with low-quality applicants” and said that “the staff who remain are significantly overworked and morale is lower than ever” because “many employees lack confidence in the agency’s leadership.”
It was recommended that the Secret Service’s other duties, including investigations into cyber and financial crimes, be halted and its focus shifted to protecting top politicians.
“In 2015, we were told that internal recommendations from the 1990s had not even been fully implemented due to willful blindness within the USSS,” Leavitt said in a post on the social media site X.
“Fundamentally, the Secret Service probably needs to be restructured. Mission creep has added collateral missions such as cyber investigations and other non-essential tasks that distract from the #1 job: protecting current, former, and future leaders of the free world from harm.”
On Sunday, the Washington Post reported on messages between former USSS officers, with one asking, “How the hell did he get a gun that close?” and the other replying, “Resources.”
A source familiar with the security planning for the Trump rally at Butler Farm told DailyMail.com that the USSS normally has three or four anti-sniper teams for such an event, but that they only had two and were relying on local law enforcement due to staffing shortages.
Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman who opened fire on former President Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13
Cheatle’s claims were heavily criticized when it was noted that the snipers positioned on the left building were also positioned on a sloped roof, behind Trump’s podium, while Crooks was on the right building
In an interview with ABC News, USSS Director Cheatle offered a baffling explanation for her agency’s failure to report on the building the would-be assassin climbed onto.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at the highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be taken into consideration, we wouldn’t want to put anybody on a sloped roof,” she said. “And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from the inside.”
Other reports indicate that there may have been a communication error between the local police and the Service.
Local station WPXI reported that gunman Thomas Crooks, 20, was spotted and photographed by snipers 30 minutes before he fired, police sources said. They sent the photos to the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit control center.
It is unclear whether the center passed this information on to USSS agents on the ground.
Videos shared on social media show attendees at the rally spotting Crooks and calling for police help more than a minute before the shooting.
President Joe Biden said Sunday that he had asked the USSS to review “all security measures” for last week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and to conduct an “independent investigation” into security at Trump’s ill-fated rally.
New York House Democratic member Ritchie Torres and Republican colleague Michael Lawler are introducing a bill that would provide better protections for all presidential candidates, including independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr.