U.S.
Trump rally shooting a security ‘failure,’ Homeland Security chief says
By
The Washington Post July 15, 2024
Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti
The Washington Post July 15, 2024
U.S. Secret Service agents and counter assault team members respond after shots were fired toward former president Donald Trump on Saturday, July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, Pa. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump was a security “failure,” but he stopped short of assigning blame or explaining how the incident would be investigated amid deepening scrutiny of the U.S. Secret Service.
Speaking on CNN, Mayorkas echoed calls by President Biden for an independent investigation of Saturday’s deadly shooting that would be conducted separately from an FBI criminal probe.
“An incident like this cannot happen,” Mayorkas said. “We are speaking of a failure.”
“We are going to analyze through an independent review how that occurred, why it occurred and make recommendations and findings to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
Mayorkas, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and other Biden administration officials face pressure to explain whether mistakes in security planning for Trump’s rally might have allowed 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire from an unsecured rooftop 450 feet away. Trump was wounded in the shooting. A man in the crowd was killed, and two others were wounded.
Cheatle has not spoken publicly since the attack, though in a statement Monday she said the agency would cooperate fully with an independent review and “work with the appropriate congressional committees on any oversight action.”
The U.S. Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Its director is appointed by the White House.
Lawmakers are launching inquiries of their own into the assassination attempt. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Monday that Cheatle will testify to lawmakers July 22.
Johnson said he spoke to Mayorkas hours after the attack and pressed the DHS secretary to explain why the Secret Service wasn’t using surveillance drones to monitor the rally from above. “Where were the drones?,” Johnson said, speaking on the Brian Kilmeade show. “You would have obviously seen someone on a rooftop.”
Johnson said he and other GOP lawmakers were consulting with former law enforcement officials to formulate a list of questions for Mayorkas and other Homeland Security officials.
Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Monday that the panel will conduct a bipartisan investigation of the shooting. The senators plan to hold a hearing “to examine security failures” that led to the shooting, the committee announced.
The House Oversight committee will receive a briefing on the assassination attempt Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the planning.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and ranking member Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) were briefed Monday morning by FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. Those briefings have been described as preliminary.
The Secret Service agents who protected Trump and killed his attacker have been widely praised for acting quickly and decisively. But it’s unclear how Crooks was able to gain access to a nearby roof with an AR-style rifle.
Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary during the Obama administration, said the Biden administration should urgently assess the failures at the Trump rally to prevent another attack in the coming months, as the nation remains deeply divided in the lead-up to November’s election.
“Somebody’s got to head up this investigation as quickly as possible,” Panetta, now a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, said in a telephone interview. “We’re not at the end of a political campaign, we’re at the beginning of a political campaign. We’ve got to quickly learn what went wrong and make sure that we’ve corrected it.”
When he was White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, Panetta said, he would meet with the Secret Service before presidential events to ensure they had considered every possible scenario and prepared for contingencies.
“Just the mere fact that he appeared on top of a roof with a rifle and had the time to sit and fire tells you something went badly wrong,” Panetta said. “I don’t know how the hell you could have let that happen.”
Bill Bratton, a former New York police commissioner and a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, said he expected the FBI-led criminal investigation to take priority over the administrative probe into the Secret Service’s actions. Authorities must conclusively and urgently determine if the shooter acted alone — which Bratton said appears increasingly likely — or in concert with any terror organizations, he said.
“What was the motivation?” he said. “That’s what they’re wrestling with at the moment.”
Bratton praised the Secret Service agents who protected Trump during the attack. But he said the agency’s preparations before the rally appear “deficient” and “not the Secret Service’s finest hour.”
“Nobody is questioning the bravery and the actions after the event began to unfold, the Secret Service putting their bodies between the sniper and the president,” he said. “It’s the run-up that’s really going to be the focus. There’s a potential for people to lose their positions as a result of this, certainly.”
Emilio T. Gonzalez, a former Army intelligence officer and Homeland Security official, said the shooting revealed flagrant flaws in the Secret Service’s planning and resources.
“This was terribly, terribly organized from a security perspective,” Gonzalez, who supports Trump, said in an interview.
“This guy should never have been that close to President Trump. His Secret Service protection should have been airtight, and it wasn’t,” he added. “Then the question is: Why wasn’t it?”
Jacqueline Alemany, Abigail Hauslohner, Carol D. Leonnig, María Luisa Paúl and Leo Sands contributed to this report.