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Secret Service security failures are revealed in damning document, that describes how agents allowed an armed guard with three arrests to ride in an elevator with President Obama
Secret Service failures that may have allowed the assassination attempt on Donald Trump were called out by a congressional watchdog nine years ago.
Now that watchdog is calling for the resignation of the agency’s chief, Kimberly Cheatle, on the day she is giving testimony to Congress.
In 2015 the House Oversight Committee published a 200-page damning 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] do not have confidence in agency leadership’.
Report author and former top Oversight staffer Tristan Leavitt, who now runs a whistleblower organization, told DailyMail.com that the Trump shooting showed those same problems persist today.
‘Almost a decade later, it looks like the Secret Service is suffering from some of the exact same problems it did 10 years ago,’ said Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight.
‘Whether Director Cheatle resigns or is removed, she should be replaced with a director from outside the agency who can clean shop from top to bottom.
The House Oversight Committee is calling for the agency’s chief Kimberly Cheatle to stand down following the attempted assassination on former president Donald Trump
Trump was hit in the ear by a bullet while giving a speech at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, last weekend
Leavitt pointed to reports that critical security at last weekend's Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was left to potentially inexperienced or under-trained counter-sniper teams from local police rather than crack Secret Service units, as well as evidence of likely poor communication between local police and USSS.
Leavitt’s 2015 report highlighted previous stunning failures in presidential security, including officials in 2014 allowing then-POTUS Barack Obama in an elevator with an armed guard with a criminal history of three arrests including shooting at a fleeing vehicle with a child inside.
The man also later slipped between agents and got inside Obama’s security formation.
The report detailed a March 2015 incident ‘where two intoxicated senior USSS officials—including a top official on the President’s protective detail—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 in the USSS,’ Leavitt said. ‘Clearly their leadership hasn’t learned its lessons, and a massive overhaul is still needed.’
While staying in Cartagena, Colombia, for a presidential visit in April 2012, 13 agents took prostitutes back to their hotel rooms. After the scandal was revealed that month, four agents were fired, five resigned and one retired.
In September 2014 a veteran with PTSD carrying a knife jumped the White House fence and entered the building’s front door.
Omar Gonzalez was overpowered by security after her burst through the front door of the White House and got as far the executive mansion's East Room.
An investigation found outer perimeter security failed to communicate effectively with agents inside, and then-Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigned the following month.
Omar Gonzalez was overpowered by security after he burst through the front door of the White House and got as far the executive mansion's East Room in 2014
Leavitt pointed to reports that security at Trump’s rally on Saturday was left to potentially inexperienced or under-trained counter-sniper teams from local police rather than crack USSS units
Leavitt’s 2015 report, written after a yearlong investigation, said it was ‘abundantly clear that USSS is in crisis’.
‘As USSS’s mission has grown, its workforce has had to do more with less. USSS is experiencing a staffing crisis that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the agency,’ the report said.
It blamed in part an ‘extraordinarily inefficient hiring process which overburdens the Secret Service with low-quality applicants’ and said ‘personnel who remain are significantly overworked, and morale is at an all-time low’, as ‘many employees do not have confidence in agency leadership’.
It advised dropping the Secret Service’s other duties including cyber and financial crime probes to focus on protection of top politicians.
‘We were told in 2015 that internal recommendations from the 1990s hadn’t even been fully implemented due to willful USSS blindness,’ Leavitt said in a post on social media site X.
‘Fundamentally, the Secret Service likely needs to be restructured. Mission creep has added collateral missions like cyber investigations and other nonessential duties that distract from its #1 job: keeping current, former, and future leaders of the free world safe from harm.’
On Sunday the Washington Post reported messages between former USSS officers, with one asking ‘How the f*** did he get a gun that close’ and the other replying ‘resources’.
A source briefed on the security planning for the Butler Farm Trump rally told DailyMail.com that whereas USSS would normally have three or four counter-sniper teams for such an event, they only had two, and were relying on local law enforcement due to staffing 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 was spotted that the snipers who were located on the left building had set up on a slanted roof too, behind Trump's podium, while Crooks was located on the right
In an interview with ABC News, USSS director Cheatle gave a baffling explanation for her agency’s failure to cover the building the would-be assassin climbed.
‘That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,’ she said. ‘And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.’
Other reporting suggests there may have been a failure in communication between local police and the Service.
Local station WPXI reported that gunman Thomas Crooks, 20, was spotted and photographed by snipers 30 minutes before he fired, according to law enforcement sources, and that they sent the pictures to Beaver County Emergency Services Unit control center.
It is unclear whether the center passed that information to USSS agents at the site.
Videos shared on social media show attendees at the rally spotting Crooks and calling out for help from police over a minute before the shooting.
On Sunday President Joe Biden said he asked USSS to review ‘all security measures’ for laast week's Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and to conduct an ‘independent review’ of the security at Trump's fatal rally.
New York Democrat House member Ritchie Torres and Republican colleague Michael Lawler are introducing a bill to give enhanced protection to all presidential candidates including independent Robert F Kennedy Jr.