The U.S. Secret Service (SS) has finally disciplined agents involved in the protection of former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, when would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to murder the former president.
Multiple news organizations have confirmed a report from RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree that multiple agency employees in the Pittsburgh Field Office are now on administrative leave. Other agents on Trump’s permanent protective detail are still on the job.
Some employees are upset that all those to blame aren’t being held accountable for the massive failure to protect Trump.
One of those who must be held to account, a source told Crabtree, is Acting Director Ron Rowe. He took over the agency after Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned.
No Defense
The trouble for the once-vaunted agency began when Thomas Matthew Crooks easily climbed to the roof of the American Glass Research (AGR) building with a clear shot at Trump from less than 200 yards. Crooks hit Trump in the ear, killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, and wounded two other men. One of those other men provided video of Crooks’ moving across the roof.
The agency’s failures were quickly exposed. Local cops involved in the protection detail spotted Crooks long before he shot Trump. Secret Service agents themselves encountered him with a rangefinder when he entered the Butler Farm Show Grounds. The agency also repeatedly denied Trump’s requests for more protection.
Cheatle, who got the top job because she was gal pals with first lady “Dr.” Jill Biden, said a countersniper was not stationed on the AGR roof because it was too steep. That claim invited richly deserved ridicule.
The director resigned after her disastrous testimony before the House Oversight Committee. In a joint letter, committee chief James Comer (R) of Kentucky and ranking minority member Jamie Raskin (D) of Maryland demanded her resignation.
Not All Agents Held to Account
The disciplinary actions against the agents in the Pittsburgh office have ruffled feathers inside the agency, Crabtree reported.
“While these members of the Pittsburgh Field Office were placed on leave, a different set of agents, several assigned to Trump’s permanent protective detail, are still on the job providing Trump protection, the sources say,” Crabtree wrote:
They remain operational even though they too were deeply involved in devising the Butler rally’s security plan.
The differing treatment of the two teams is spurring internal dissension and speculation that the Pittsburgh office could bear the brunt of the serious security failures that day, even though there’s plenty of blame to go around.
The obvious question is who else might be responsible. Crabtree’s sources point not only to agents on Trump’s detail, but also to bigwigs in Washington, D.C.
“Rowe and other senior officials back in Washington headquarters should share the blame, these sources argue,” Crabtree continued:
The agency’s top brass were almost certainly involved in declining at least some of the security assets requested for the Butler rally despite a heightened threat level brought on by a specific Iranian assassination plot against Trump.
Former Agents “Horrified”
Crabtree also cited former agent Dan Bongino, a conservative podcaster, who said he and his colleagues “are horrified at Ron Rowe, ashamed at what this agency has become.”
Fumed Bongino:
I’m not talking about a small cadre of them. I’m talking about a big group of former agents [who] are on fire about what happened here — they are horrified about what’s going on with this agency.
Crabtree’s sources also blame Rowe and other agency elites “because their decisions leading up to the July 13 rally set the rank-and-file agents up for failure.”
“Leadership’s mismanagement of technology and personnel are what led to the failures in Butler, but they are not the ones being held accountable,” a source in the Secret Service community told RealClearPolitics. …
Mid-level Secret Service managers based in D.C. routinely reduce the level of security assets as a way to cut costs. There’s even greater pressure to reject asset requests during presidential campaign years when agency resources are especially stretched thin because there are multiple candidates to protect.
Because of the heightened Iranian threat against Trump, those decisions wouldn’t just be made by mid-level Secret Service managers but likely would involve top agency officials too, the sources argued. In the case of the Butler rally, it was the first time agency leaders approved counter snipers for a Trump reelection event, but they still only allotted two counter sniper teams rather than the four teams requested, multiple sources have told RCP.
The agency didn’t have enough snipers to cover the event in Butler. So the agency asked local cops to provide perimeter security and watch the roof from which Crooks tried to assassinate Trump.
Multiple Problems With Coverage
As well, Crabtree noted, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R) of Missouri — who, citing whistleblowers, earlier said Trump’s protective detail comprised Homeland Security Investigations agents, not Secret Service agents — told Rowe in a letter that a whistleblower blamed Rowe for “significant cuts” to the agency’s Countersurveillance Division (CSD).
[CSD] did not perform its typical evaluation of the Butler site and was not present on the day. This is significant because CSD’s duties include evaluating potential security threats outside the security perimeter and mitigating those threats during the event. The whistleblower claims that if personnel from CSD had been present at the rally, the gunman would have been handcuffed in the parking lot after being spotted with a rangefinder. You acknowledged in your Senate testimony that the American Glass Research complex should have been included in the security perimeter for the Butler event. The whistleblower alleges that because CSD was not present in Butler, this manifest shortcoming was never properly flagged or mitigated.
Five days later, Hawley wrote to Rowe again. The lead site agent from the Pittsburgh Office “was known to lack competence in the role and failed to implement appropriate security protocols,” the senator wrote. Hawley wanted to know why the agent was still employed. “Your refusal to hold this individual accountable is increasingly inexplicable,” he wrote.
Female Agents DEI Hires
Last week, Crabtree offered details about that female agent, as well as the female agent in charge of Trump’s protective detail.
“As a member of Trump’s 60-member regular detail, the agent was responsible for helping formulate the security plan for the event, although she was mostly focused on the inner perimeter,” Crabtree reported:
She also joined forces with the event’s lead agent, a woman from the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh Field Office, in conducting a walk-through of the security with supervisors. The lead agent typically oversees security at the entire event from airport arrival to event to hotel stay to airport departure.
The two agents in charge of the campaign event were diversity, equity, and inclusion hires.
Video of the assassination attempt showed that female agents either panicked or didn’t know what they were doing.
One of Cheatle’s goals was ensuring that women made up 30 percent of agency employees by 2030.
H/T: Daily Caller
