‘Was something amiss?’: Ex federal agents rip Secret Service for handling of Trump rally and shooting response

The Secret Service needs to act “extremely quickly” in reviewing its protective strategies following an attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life, one former agent who served on Barack Obama’s security detail says.

The agency will now face its own reckoning in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, which saw the candidate’s ear bloodied by a gunman taking aim from a nearby roof.

Numerous groups have raised questions about how the Secret Service didn’t stop the shooting and how agents responded in its aftermath.

As Trump, President Joe Biden and long-shot third-party contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continue to ramp up public appearances in advance of Election Day, time is unreservedly of the essence for Secret Service officials to get their house in order, former agent Jonathan Wackrow said.

A “mission-assurance review” will be an immediate internal focus, in an effort to analyze the agency’s playbook, Wackrow told The Independent.

“Was something amiss? Was there a communications issue? What were the precipitating events that this shooter took to get up onto the roof? The next few months are a sprint for the Secret Service, the candidates are going to be doing rallies, multiple events, so the Secret Service has to ensure their methodology and approach doesn’t need to be changed,” Wackrow said. “Or if they do, they need to enact those changes extremely quickly.”

The Republican National Convention is set to take place in Milwaukee from July 15 through the 18, with Trump being officially nominated as the party’s candidate.

According to Wackrow, who spent five years protecting Obama and the First Lady, the Secret Service must now “make sure their protective methodology was applied correctly, [and] that the site was built out to the standards all agents have been trained on, to understand where any potential lapses occurred within the security plan.”

Follow our live blog for updates on the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump

The building atop which 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was perched was outside the rally itself, which Wackrow described as the “primary secure site.” However, he went on, the structure was “still within the area of vulnerabilities, so a lot of questions remain unanswered.”

The FBI now has primary jurisdiction over the investigation into the shooting itself, Wackrow said.

According to former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker, the bureau will not only investigate the assassination attempt, it will also probe the Secret Service’s “security strategy.”

Agents “will tear this thing apart” to find answers, and “there’ll be ‘lessons learned’ immediately, which I think will be put into play at the RNC,” Swecker said Sunday in a televised interview with Fox News. (An updated security plan for the nominating confab is already being developed, unnamed sources told CBS News.)

“This was a security breakdown from start to finish,” Swecker argued. “The primary mission of the Secret Service is to prevent this type of action, and then react as swiftly as they can to get [the protectee] out of the danger zone. Neither happened here. I don’t want to issue harsh judgments. But it was definitely a security breakdown.”

Following the shooting, Trump turned to the crowd and pumped his fist numerous times, mouthing the words, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” And while this may have produced a memorable photo opportunity for the former president, his Secret Service detail should not have allowed it to happen, according to Swecker. Agents “should have whisked him out of there in seconds, no matter what he wanted to do,” Swecker said.

“[H]e should have been off that stage, in that car, and out of there in seconds,” he said. “And it was a lifetime. If there had been a second shooter, they would have taken him out… it was almost a kill-shot as it was… So this breaks every rule of the Secret Service’s protocol, and just executive protection in general.”

Dennis Franks, a former FBI supervisory special agent assigned at one time to the bureau’s SWAT team, has his own questions about the Secret Service’s response on Saturday. While emphasizing that the Secret Service “does a remarkable job every day,” any after-action review will need to address the agency’s clear shortfall in this situation, Franks told The Independent.

“There were Secret Service snipers [on the scene], observers, plus cameras and other sorts of detection systems” Franks said. “Why did they not detect him being up there? Or, if they did detect him, what was the response? Or lack of response? How did this happen? How did they let it happen?”

There have been ingrained problems within Secret Service management “for years,” Wackrow told NPR in 2015.

The agency has long had a culture mired in the past, with the same people utilizing the same methods over and over again, according to Wackrow.

“And it really is going to take somebody from the outside to come in who was not part of the problem to give a fresh set of eyes to look at, hey, who are we hiring?” he said. “Are we hiring the best qualified candidates? Should we change the way that we hire?”

The present director of the Secret Service, 27-year veteran Kimberly Cheatle, took control of the agency in September 2022.