The cowardice and incompetence of the US Secret Service

It was essentially by pure luck that Donald Trump survived the attempt on his life earlier this month. It was certainly no thanks to the US Secret Service or its recently departed head, Kimberly Cheatle.

Earlier this week, Cheatle gave a disastrous testimony before Congress about the assassination cock-up. Her performance was so abysmal that she was forced to resign, having failed to answer the most basic questions put to her by the House Oversight Committee. Most importantly, she simply could not explain how a would-be assassin was left to roam free and come within inches of killing a former president and current candidate on live television.

In a rare display of bipartisan agreement, the committee called for her resignation. Democratic representative Jamie Raskin – certainly no friend of Trump – spoke for the committee when he said: ‘The director has lost the confidence of Congress, at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country.’ The next day Cheatle exited the stage, relegated to be an obscure footnote in the story of the near-assassination.

It is a testimony to the fecklessness of the Secret Service that it took her 10 days to resign after the shooting. It is shocking, too, that no on-site agents were fired. The timeline reconstruction of how events unfolded is a damning indictment of the agency.

We now know that, six days before Trump was scheduled to speak, 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks visited the site of the rally. Then, on the morning before the rally, Crooks returned, stayed for an hour and left.

Later that afternoon at 4pm, Crooks came back to the site once again and flew a drone about 200 yards from the spot where Trump would be speaking. An hour or so later, he was recorded pacing just beyond the boundaries of the rally. At this point, the Secret Service identified him as a person of interest. At around 5.30pm, he was spotted with a rangefinder and this information was relayed to law enforcement.

At 5.52pm, Crooks was spotted by Secret Service agents near a building, just 150 yards from the stage. Agents performed a brief ground search, but found nothing.

Minutes after Trump took to the stage at 6pm, several attendees outside the rally saw Crooks crawling across the roof of a building, and tried to attract the attention of law enforcement. There were no Secret Service agents on this roof, purportedly because it was sloped and was therefore considered too dangerous for them. A local police officer did attempt to scale it, but Crooks pointed a weapon at him and the officer retreated.

Then, at 6.12pm, Crooks fired eight shots at the stage and was almost immediately taken out by law-enforcement snipers.

How was all of this ever allowed to happen in the first place? In her testimony before Congress, Cheatle was notably unhelpful. Besides the ludicrous excuse as to why there was no agent on the roof, she had virtually no answers. She could not say exactly how many agents were on the ground, how the shooter got on the roof or why Trump was not pulled off the stage before the gunman started firing. She was vague about how many shots were fired, how many casings were discovered and what the shooter’s possible motives might have been.

Another question Cheatle did not clarify was whether the Trump detail was undermanned. One congressman pointed out that first lady Jill Biden was speaking the same day at a rally in nearby Pittsburgh. This could well have meant that fewer agents were available for the Trump rally.

Ironically, the most devastating questioning during the committee hearing came from Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC has historically been a proponent of defunding the police and is generally inimical to law enforcement. In this case, perhaps conscious of her own personal security (she was publicly threatened during the ‘January 6’ affair), she viciously laid into Cheatle:

‘The individual used an AR-15 in order to act on his assassination attempt. An AR-15 has a range of about four to 600 yards. My question is, why is the Secret Service protective perimeter shorter than one of the most popular semi-automatic weapons in the United States?’

When you’ve lost AOC on police protection, you know you’ve lost the country.

Perhaps the most disgraceful part of Cheatle’s hearing was her attempt to downplay the Secret Service’s failures. It bears remembering that, besides Trump’s minor wound, one man was killed and another two were seriously injured. Yet when asked what mark she would give her agents for their performance that day, she said an ‘A’. It is hard to imagine what curve she was grading on.

The sheer incompetence on display at the Trump rally stands in stark contrast to the heroism captured in one of the most iconic images ever of a Secret Service agent in action. In 1963, agent Clint Hill leapt over the back of the presidential limousine to shield Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Hill risked his life to force her back into the car as she tried to climb out, not knowing whether more shots were coming. He then clung to the back seat during the high-speed trip to the hospital. Now, at 92 years old, Hill blames himself for JFK’s death, to the point of developing post-traumatic stress disorder. He still believes that if he had acted more quickly he could have protected the president.

It’s difficult to believe that this is the same Secret Service that refused to place agents on a sloped roof, in case it was too dangerous – resulting in an assassination attempt that could just as well have been as deadly as that in 1963. I can’t help but wonder if Hill was listening to Cheatle’s testimony. What must he have made of it?

Cory Franklin’s new book, The Covid Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened, is now available on Amazon in Kindle and book form.