Secret Service failures that may have allowed the attempted assassination of Donald Trump were exposed by a congressional watchdog nine years ago.
Now, the watchdog is calling for the resignation of agency head Kimberly Cheatle on the same day she is set to testify before Congress.
In 2015, the House Oversight Committee released a damning 200-page report on the United States Secret Service (USSS) that described an agency “in crisis” with “systemic mismanagement,” chronic underfunding, an “extraordinarily inefficient hiring process,” and “many employees (who) have no confidence in the agency’s leadership.”
The report’s author and former senior member of the Oversight Department, Tristan Leavitt, who now runs a whistleblowing organisation, told DailyMail.com that Trump’s shooting showed those same problems persist today.
“Nearly a decade later, it appears the Secret Service is suffering from some of the same problems it did 10 years ago,” said Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight.
‘Whether Director Cheatle resigns or is removed, she should be replaced by a director from outside the agency who can clean things up from top to bottom.
House Oversight Committee calls for agency head Kimberly Cheatle to resign following attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump
Trump was shot in the ear while giving a speech at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, last weekend.
Leavitt pointed to reports that critical security at Trump’s rally last weekend in Butler, Pennsylvania, was left to potentially inexperienced or poorly trained sniper teams from local police rather than elite Secret Service units, as well as evidence of likely poor communication between local law enforcement and the USSS.
Leavitt’s 2015 report highlighted previous lapses in presidential security, including the fact that in 2014 officials allowed then-President Barack Obama to enter an elevator with an armed guard with a criminal record of three arrests, including shooting at a fleeing vehicle with a child inside.
The man later also slipped past officers and into Obama’s security detail.
The report details an incident in March 2015 “in which two intoxicated senior USSS officials, including a senior official on the President’s protective team, interfered with a crime scene involving a bomb threat just outside the White House grounds.”
“As bad as those and other details were, they were just symptoms of a much larger breakdown at the USSS,” Leavitt said. “It’s clear that its leaders have not learned their lesson and a large-scale restructuring is still needed.”
In April 2012, during a presidential visit to Cartagena, 13 officers brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms. After the scandal broke that month, four officers were fired, five resigned and one retired.
In September 2014, a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) carrying a knife jumped the White House fence and entered through the building’s front door.
Omar Gonzalez was overpowered by security after breaking through the main door of the White House and reaching the East Room of the executive mansion.
An investigation found that outer perimeter security did not communicate effectively with agents inside, and then-Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned the following month.
Omar Gonzalez was overpowered by security after he stormed through the front door of the White House and into the East Room of the executive mansion in 2014.
Leavitt pointed to reports that security at Trump’s rally on Saturday was left to potentially inexperienced or poorly trained local police sniper teams rather than elite USSS units.
Leavitt’s 2015 report, written after a yearlong investigation, said it was “amply clear that the USSS is in crisis.”
“As the USSS mission has grown, its workforce has had to do more with less. The USSS is experiencing a staffing crisis that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the agency,” the report said.
He blamed in part an “extraordinarily inefficient hiring process that overburdens the Secret Service with low-quality applicants” and said that “staff that remains is significantly overworked and morale is at an all-time low” as “many employees lack confidence in the agency’s leadership.”
He advised abandoning other Secret Service functions, including cybercrime and financial crime investigations, to focus on protecting top politicians.
“We were told in 2015 that internal recommendations from the 1990s had not even been fully implemented due to willful blindness by the USSS,” Leavitt said in a post on social media site X.
‘At its core, the Secret Service probably needs a restructuring. The expansion of missions has added collateral missions such as cyber investigations and other non-essential tasks that distract from its core job: keeping the current, past and future leaders of the free world safe 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 briefed on security planning for Trump’s Butler Farm rally told DailyMail.com that while the USSS would normally have three or four sniper teams for such an event, they only had two and were relying on local police due to staff shortages.
Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman who opened fire on former President Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13
Cheatle’s claims were heavily criticized as it emerged that the snipers who were positioned in the building on the left had also been set up on a sloped roof behind Trump’s podium, while Crooks was positioned on the right.
In an interview with ABC News, USSS Director Cheatle gave a puzzling explanation for his agency’s failure to cover up the building the would-be assassin climbed.
“That particular building has a sloped roof at its highest point. So there’s a safety factor that has to be taken into account – we don’t want to put someone on a sloped roof,” he said. “So the decision was made to secure the building from the inside.”
Other reports suggest there may have been a breakdown in communication between local police and the Service.
Local station WPXI Gunman Thomas Crooks, 20, was reportedly spotted and photographed by snipers 30 minutes before he fired, police sources said, and the photos were sent to the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit control center.
It is unclear whether the center passed that information on to USSS agents at the site.
Videos shared on social media show protesters spotting Crooks and calling for police help more than a minute before the shooting.
On Sunday, President Joe Biden said he asked the USSS to review “all security measures” for last week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and to conduct an “independent review” of security at Trump’s fatal rally.
New York House Democratic member Ritchie Torres and his Republican colleague Michael Lawler are introducing a bill to provide greater protections for all presidential candidates, including independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr.