In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump just a few days ago, pundits are issuing their analyses and critiques of the Secret Service’s strategic and tactical failure to ensure the safety of the 45th president and the Republicans’ 2024 presidential candidate.
One glance at the layout of the rally grounds, and it doesn’t take a security expert to realize that the Secret Service’s failure on this occasion was epic. But it’s not the only recent failure by this once illustrious organization under its newest director, Kimberly Cheatle. Cheatle has been the head of the Secret Service for a little more than two years.
Sadly, this failure was on display not just to the American people; the video of the near fatal assassination attempt has been seen in every civilized — and not so civilized — nation on Earth. Truly, the bullet from Thomas Crooks’s AR-15 that wounded President Trump, and came desperately close to killing him, was the shot heard round the world.
Cheatle has acknowledged that “the buck stops with me,” but she’s not resigning. There have been deflections, with attempts to blame local police (“they were in charge of the perimeter”) as well as Cheatle’s declaration that agents were stationed inside the building Crooks fired from (because “it was sloped and unsafe for the agents”)!
As more and more information on the events surrounding the rally emerge, both before and during Trump’s appearance on the stage, the apparent blunders and examples of ineptitude have multiplied. As Dana Perino opined from her Fox News desk at the RNC convention, “this is a catastrophic cascade of incompetence.”
Let’s turn the clock back to July 2, 2023, barely a year after Kimberly Cheatle had been appointed the new director. The same Secret Service found a bag of cocaine in the West Wing of the White House, which includes the Oval Office and other working offices of the presidential aides and staff. The White House is supposed to be the most secure residence in the entire world. Not anymore.
Immediately, the Secret Service went to work to ferret out the culprit who brought an illicit drug into the heart of the nation’s capital. Now let’s put on our Sherlock Holmes deerstalkers and think. What individual connected to President Biden do we know of who regularly indulged in drug use — in fact, even took pictures and videos of himself in various states of drug-induced stupor? Why, Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
Immediately, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told us that Biden and his family weren’t in the White House when the cocaine was discovered. They were all at Camp David. And the media dutifully repeated her statement in every story published or every newscast aired. It was a transparently pre-emptive bid to deflect suspicion from the obvious and prime suspect.
The obvious rebuttal to that is that the cocaine could’ve been placed there while the Biden family was still in residence. There’s also some discrepancy as to the exact time the Bidens left for Camp David. Was it before or after the cocaine was discovered? Did they whisk Hunter away so that he wouldn’t have to face questions from the Secret Service or the media?
Less than two weeks later, the nation’s premier investigative agency, under their newly appointed director of less than a year, abandoned its inquest. They claimed that there wasn’t enough DNA or fingerprints on the bag of cocaine to implicate anyone, no video surveillance footage that identified the culprit, and that interviewing the 500 or so staff and visitors might infringe on their privacy and civil rights.
These sound like feeble excuses — a flimsy attempt to whitewash the matter and keep from further debasing the already foul reputation of Biden’s drug-snorting, whoremongering son, not to mention having more criminal charges brought against him.
The upshot of this episode is that the Secret Service looked inept — on the surface. To more discerning minds, it was obvious that they had been directed to protect President Biden — and his son — from anything incriminating. And they had a director selected for her office by Jill Biden, who got to know her when she was the head of Jill’s security detail. Was Cheatle chosen for her capability or for her loyalty to the president’s wife? That she was willing to sacrifice the Secret Service’s sterling reputation to please her “mistress” is telling.
The legacy media accepted the Secret Service’s explanation without much question. A few voices raised some doubts, but they soon melted away, and the event was all but forgotten — until the Secret Service’s recent monumental failure. Then this anemic investigation sprang readily to mind.
The once-revered Secret Service, the world’s finest protective and investigative agency, has fallen from its lofty heights and has, at the very least, demonstrated serious ineptitude on these past two occasions. Is there more behind these failures? The chilling reality is that we may never know.
Eric Dawe is an award-winning writer, chess enthusiast, and the author of two historical fiction novels based on Virgil’s Aeneid: Aeneas, Last King of Troy and Aeneas, Landfall of Legend.
Image: kolyaeg via Pixabay, Pixabay License.