Does the Secret Service have ultimate responsibility for protecting presidential candidates? Yes. Did Thomas Crooks’s assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump constitute what the Secret Service refers to as a “near-lethal approach”? Yes. That means a protective failure of the second highest order.
Yet, while some of the more specific criticisms the Secret Service is now receiving are fair, others are far less so.
Let’s start with the legitimate criticisms.
Communications/Command-Control
Trump’s Secret Service detail covered him in coordinated fashion within three seconds of the first gunshots being fired (a far faster and more effective response than what we’ve seen with many other protective details around the world). Nevertheless, that a sniper was able to get so close to the presidential front-runner is deeply disturbing. What happened?
The first point to note is that the Secret Service often enlists local or state police officers to guard buildings or other locations that an attacker might employ for attack. It does so because just as the Secret Service Uniformed Division at the White House cannot fan out to cover every potential mortar attack location during a Rose Garden event, the Secret Service’s countersniper teams cannot monitor every prospective sniper position at maximal efficiency. They must triage their capabilities.
These countersniper teams must do so because they aren’t simply looking for snipers on factory roofs. They’re also looking at nearby roads, at bushes, and into the crowd of supporters. And as shown by the countersniper team’s extreme efficiency in targeting Crooks after he opened fire (yes, too late), these snipers are among the very best in the world. The problem here is that even if local law enforcement did not follow its assigned responsibility to monitor the roof attack position, the Secret Service should have conducted a radio post check to ensure that police officers were in place on that roof. That this didn’t happen indicates a command/communications failure.
There are further indications of a possible failure of the Secret Service advance team (assigned to scout locations/attack vulnerabilities/escape routes prior to an event). The New York Post reports that those living close to Crooks’s attack location were not visited either by police officers or the Secret Service in the days preceding the rally.
Then there are the witnesses who said that they told police officers minutes before the attack that they had seen a rifle-wielding man (later proven to be Crooks) climb onto the roof. While an officer eventually climbed up a ladder to check on these reports (being forced back down by Crooks’s rifle pointed at his face), this response took too long. The Secret Service command post would have had representatives from all attending law enforcement agencies in it. Did the police officers radio the witness reports of a rifleman to the command post? If not, why not? And if they did, why didn’t the Secret Service immediately push that information to its personnel? Some failure plainly occurred because had Trump’s detail agents been informed of even a possible sniper threat, they would have immediately removed him from the stage until the gunman report could be investigated.
Protective resources
Journalist Susan Crabtree (who has excellent Secret Service sources) and conservative commentator Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who served on the presidential protective detail, both claim that Trump’s detail requested but did not receive additional protective resources prior to Saturday’s rally. While the Secret Service has denied this, it may be stretching the truth.
Even if, as the Secret Service claims, the agency boosted certain capabilities on Trump’s detail, that doesn’t mean it boosted all those that the detail agent in charge had requested. We need to know whether additional countersniper team coverage or post agents (who could, for example, have been assigned to watch the sniper’s building) were requested. Note also that in pushing back to some of Crabtree’s assertions, the Secret Service avoided commenting on her report that Trump’s detail has been overworked (suggesting it is structurally too small) and lacked sufficient countersnipers. Secret Service whistleblowers will be able to speak to these concerns if they are legitimate.
Now onto the less credible complaints.
Sunglasses and female agents
Let’s deal with those who say too many of Trump’s Secret Service agents were fixated on holding on to their sunglasses. This suggestion implies that the agents sought style over Trump’s security. But what is missed here is that Secret Service agents employ sunglasses for protection against glare, laser/light/flashbang distraction attacks, and to prevent suspects from seeing who they are looking at. It should go without saying that an agent who cannot see is not going to be very useful.
Next up, there are the female agent complaints. I was the first to report on an incident in April in which an agent assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris’s detail attacked other agents at Andrews Air Force Base. That this agent was assigned to protect the vice president indicates that the Secret Service’s personnel/psychological assessment protocols may be problematic. It’s certainly true that the Secret Service has prioritized DEI initiatives in recent years, particularly under current Director Kimberly Cheatle. If this has led to the recruitment of DEI-compatible applicants over otherwise more qualified applicants, then Cheatle needs to be fired and hiring reforms enacted.
That said, the suggestion by a number of prominent conservatives since Saturday’s incident that female agents shouldn’t be allowed to serve on protective details is an absurd one. This contention is being offered in light of one Trump female detail agent on duty on Saturday who is smaller than the former president. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL), for example, told my colleague Tim Carney that “Donald Trump is six-foot-two. I’m five-foot-three. You wouldn’t want me protecting him. I cannot physically take a bullet for him at that height. And so when you have people who are just not physically capable of doing so, we have to have that conversation.” Cammack also said that “I think there has to be a full top-down review of are we putting our best on our most hybrid, high-profile targets.”
I have no idea what a “most hybrid” target is. Regardless, there are two simple repudiations to Cammack’s argument. First, Cammack is not a Secret Service protective detail agent with commensurate physicality and protective training. Second, protective details are not the sum of one but of many. In turn, the first priority of any Secret Service agent is intellect and perception, not size and strength. Anticipating a threat is far more valuable than responding to it after the fact. And if a protectee ducks, as Trump did when the first shots were fired, a female agent can effectively cover a protectee (as this female agent did).
Top line: This agent did a good job on Saturday. She was the fourth to cover Trump and did so at an area of his body that remains vulnerable. She communicated quickly and clearly. She covered Trump effectively for most of the route to the motorcade, also bearing Trump’s weight as he stepped off the campaign stage. Singling her out is unfair: Other male agents directly behind Trump did not always have his head totally covered during the evacuation.
It’s also important to remember that female agents fill a protective need for female protectees who may have personal concerns that would make the presence of male agents uncomfortable for them in certain scenarios. Protection is very challenging absent a protectee’s trust for those who are protecting them. Gender diversity is far more of a “value add” to a protective detail than it is a vulnerability.
Other criticism has been leveled at three female agents assigned to the motorcade holding area. Again, however, this is broadly unfair. While one agent struggled to holster her weapon, the key point is that these agents were operating amid chaos but still doing what they were supposed to be doing. Their primary role here was to watch for a rushing threat from the crowd and to obstruct a suicide bomber or other threat that might be able to breach the vehicle’s armored glass window. Put simply, the situation was chaotic, but the agents did what they were supposed to do.
Trump’s detail didn’t evacuate him quickly enough
Trump was covered three seconds after the first shots were fired. But was Trump evacuated from the stage too slowly?
It’s a mixed answer.
A video of the incident shows the agents covering Trump, waiting for the notification that the shooter is down, and waiting for the Counter Assault Team to take up position to neutralize any additional threats. But the agents have more to think about than simply covering and evacuating Trump because the covering element of Trump’s protection requires far more than what we see on the video. The agents around Trump need to wait until the entire protective envelope has been reinforced. They must anticipate that the shooter is a diversionary attacker creating a distraction for other assailants. Therefore, they must wait for agents to take up position along the route between the stage and the motorcade. They need to wait for agents to get in place at the motorcade site. They need to wait to make sure the motorcade can move at speed once Trump is embarked. In the end, the agents did this well, communicating as a team and coherently moving as one.
What’s more debatable is whether, once up and moving, the detail was too slow to get Trump to the car.
First came Trump’s demand that he be able to put on his shoe. While some might say that the agents should have simply carried Trump to the armored vehicle, we should remember that Trump weighs over 200 pounds. At the point of movement, the Secret Service knew one shooter was down, no continued attack was underway, but also that shots had been fired and Trump had a head wound. Allowing Trump to put on his shoe was a judgment call, yes, but one that guarded against the risk of Trump slipping, suffering further injury. What hasn’t been noticed by many is that when Trump reached his vehicle, he attempted to stand on a running board and again salute the crowd. At this point, the detail literally pushed Trump inside and followed him in (to assess his injuries/provide further cover as needed).
Top line: Hard questions will be asked in the coming days, and the independent assessment announced by President Joe Biden should be welcomed. But relentlessly criticizing the Secret Service on every detail without knowing how protection actually works is not very clever.