by Frank Holmes, reporter
The Biden-Harris administration insists it’s doing its best to protect President Donald J. Trump. Two avoidable assassination attempts say otherwise—and so do multiple law enforcement agents familiar with the security planning that preceded the president’s potential murder.
Multiple “credible whistleblowers” have sounded the alarm that the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) did an incomplete, unprofessional, and shoddy job of preparing for the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where President Donald J. Trump took a bullet to the ear.
The facts are contained in an explosive new 22-page whistleblower report compiled by America First conservative Senator Josh Hawley, R-M.O.
“Following the latest assassination attempt on” President Donald Trump on Sunday, “I’m releasing a comprehensive Whistleblower Report on the multiple failures of Secret Service & DHS – including new allegations & numerous unanswered questions due to USSS stonewalling,” said Sen. Hawley earlier this week.
The whistleblowers “reveal a compounding pattern of negligence, sloppiness, and gross incompetence that goes back years, all of which culminated in an assassination attempt that came inches from succeeding,” his office said.
🚨🚨 NEW – Following the latest assassination attempt on @realDonaldTrump, I’m releasing a comprehensive Whistleblower Report on the multiple failures of Secret Service & DHS – including new allegations & numerous unanswered questions due to USSS stonewalling pic.twitter.com/Rxcim9N05U
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 16, 2024
The lead agent overseeing the Butler rally that nearly claimed the life of President Donald Trump was known to be a “low-caliber agent” who failed a massively important test during training, the report says.
Ordinarily, when a president or presidential candidate can set foot on a site he plans to visit, Secret Service agents will scope out the area for threats. That security sweep is conducted by a specially trained group of agents known as the Secret Service’s Counter Surveillance Division.
But they didn’t do that in Butler and didn’t show up on the day of the attempted assassination. They were nowhere in sight.
The Secret Service agents who were on the case boxed in the local police they partnered with.
When local police offered to have a drone fly over the sight during the event to search for threats, the Secret Service told them no.
That’s ironic, since the alleged shooter used a drone to plan the entire assassination in the first place. If that wasn’t enough, “The Secret Service’s Office of Protective Operations-Manpower told agents in charge of security for the Butler rally not to request additional security resources because they would be denied.”
Since Secret Service and local security sources were hamstrung or shorthanded, they had to secure the facility with agents from the Department of Homeland Security—who were reportedly taken off child exploitation cases to show up at the rally.
“Whistleblower allegations to my office report that the only training received by many [DHS law enforcement] agents reassigned to work protective details is a single two-hour webinar on Microsoft Teams featuring pre-recorded videos,” Sen. Hawley wrote in a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this month.
As a result of these acts of negligence of sabotage, a would-be assassin was able to mount a position on top of American Glass Research Building 6 and get off a shot that would have blown Trump’s brains out if he had not providentially moved his head ever-so-slightly.
The security fiasco didn’t end after President Trump was shot in the head after turning his head a fraction of an inch. “The hospital site where former President Trump received treatment after the shooting was poorly secured,” the report discloses. The Secret Service site agent responsible for hospital security “did not know what was going on and could not answer basic questions about site security.”
Of course, all these security lapses happened at the first assassination attempt, not the second one on Sunday, September 15.
“[A]ll of these allegations together suggest that a significant number of personnel tasked with providing security for former President Trump at the July 13 rally were egregiously under-prepared by the Secret Service to carry out this mission,” Hawley wrote Mayorkas.
The Biden-Harris administration said it had effectively reformed the agency in between those events—but Hawley isn’t buying it.
“How you can say it’s effective when the shooter was able to be (staking out the golf course) for 12 hours, I don’t know,” Hawley told Laura Ingraham on her Fox News program, The Ingraham Angle. “The facts are devastating, and there are no answers.”
But Hawley is going to get them.
Gathering his report is just the beginning. Senator Hawley has now turned his findings over to the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, which will probe the whole matter to the very end.
His report details multiple pressing questions investigators must demand this administration answers.
“Who, within the Secret Service, was the lead agent for the Butler visit on July 13?” Even though the whistleblower told Hawley’s office the name of the agent, the Biden-Harris administration is stonewalling, covering up for this person’s incompetence. Official channels in “executive branch agencies will neither confirm nor deny the agent’s identity publicly,” the report says.
Hawley wants to know if a single human being in the USSS has been “fired, suspended, or subject to any discipline for actions related to the rally at Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024.”
That’s a difference that Donald Trump has highlighted repeatedly on the campaign trail: Harris never fires anyone, no matter how lousy his performance.
“Who, within the Secret Service, made the decision to deny counter sniper coverage to the rooftop from which Thomas Crooks shot former President Trump on July 13?”
The American people want to know: Who’s responsible? Who’s going to pay for these screw-ups? And what is the administration going to do to fix it?
And with as many “mistakes” as we’ve seen made by the Secret Service, which is under the influence of the president, two other questions come to mind: Did rotten agents embed themselves in Trump’s Secret Service detail? And did Joe Biden, who was at the White House meeting that signed off on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into bogus charges of Russian collusion, order the Deep State to stand down and stand by?
Hats off to Hawley for starting the investigation.