The refusing the extra security requests from the campaign sounds bad, but apparently they were warned that it was riskier to hold events in outside venues. This will all get blamed on the SS and Ms. Cheatle, but IMO the campaign should get some of the blame too. They chose an unsafe venue that would have required extra personnel to man it properly.
Pennsylvania state police commissioner reveals stunning details about Trump shooting | CNN Politics
the pa state police commissioner answered questions that the secret police director would not answer yest… he was able to give answers to timeline and amounts of bullets. the director would not.
Stunning? I read the article and there wasn’t anything new in it except the mention of eight shells. CNN is turning into FOX.
Luckily for Trump, he was unfamiliar with the term “center of mass”.
Yes. The theory that they had been choosing outdoor venues because they’re cheaper—or because cities with indoor venues chose not to deal with the Trump campaign due to notorious failures to pay their bills—is quite credible.
But as you say, Trump and his people will escape all blame, which will land instead on Biden who hired an obviously unqualified (because female!) Secret Service head.
Exactly. It all falls at the feet of Trump. If he had not been so cheap and lazy, wanting to basically just get off his plane at small airport tarmacs or drive a short distance to some field, the Secret Service wouldn’t have had such a hard time securing these events. He will probably get a lot of push back on this now and may ::gasp:: have to pay to use proper venues. That could be somewhat of a problem since he apparently still owes some dozen cities for the rallies he had there.
Trump’s campaign still owes El Paso over $500K for 2019 rally, other cities also unpaid (kfoxtv.com)
I suspect that either her own department was stonewalling her efforts to find out what happened, or the department is so large that she hadn’t yet found who had the information she wanted. There may also have been an element of her having been there so long that she felt a loyalty to her coworkers, and didn’t want to throw them under the bus to the committee.
I’m not trying to defend (former) Director Cheatle. Her department screwed up, and as the person at the top, she bears ultimate responsibility. I just think that most committee questioning is pure performance and not intended to get actual answers to questions. Suppose she had answered everything perfectly, what was the committee going to do with that information? Are they going to micro-manage every detail of the Secret Service now; choose the agents, sign off on every expense, set the security perimeter for every campaign event? They wouldn’t have time for anything else.
Institute a urethra length test* in addition to the paper bag test.
*Maybe just a write your name in the snow test during winter months.
If I was named the new director, my first order of business would be to give the campaigns a list of approved venues. If they want to have a rally elsewhere; they provide their own security.
This. They had to bleep some of the questions and if I were her I’d make them walk back any kind of unruly behavior. That forces the questions to be more factual. But she needed to be able to answer factual questions regarding process. Did they follow codified procedures and if not where did they go off track. That venue represented a challenge to codified procedures and they need to account for deficiencies.
He may have to get someone else to pay to use proper venues. Trump won’t pay a dime.
Indeed. Her team must have known while the candidate was still being hauled out of the site that she was going to be sitting down in front of a pissed off committee the day Congress got back from Recess.
Biggest part: don’t sound evasive or uncertain. If you believe you did things right, say you believe you did things right, and if Congressman McFreedomface thinks otherwise, stand by it confidently. Or say, “sorry you don’t like the answer, but we cannot know otherwise as of this hour and day and anyone telling you otherwise is misleading you”.
Or, if indeed there WAS a &^%$-up, then just own it. That’s what heading an Exec Branch agency entails. As was stated earlier,
And when it does, the buck stops with you, Chief.
Very much so. And it’s perfectly in-character of them to feel they can just expect DHS and the local PDs to simply have to cover the extra expense and use of human resource to secure more-exposed locations.
I think the key questions are…
1: How much resources are we willing to devote to the security detail of any one non-President individual?
2: Was that level of resources what Trump actually got?
3: Was that level of resources, if used effectively, enough to secure this venue?
4: If not, was the Trump campaign informed of that fact, and decided to hold the event at that venue anyway?
But yeah, the head of the Secret Service in a congressional inquiry should have been prepared to answer questions like that.
Yes.
Also, it’s not impossible that SS personnel, when contacted by the Trump campaign with requests for extra resources, wondered if Trump just wanted to be able to substitute SS resources for whatever he was currently paying for himself. Because of course he’d be able to put extra cash in his own pocket if he could get away with hiring less security.
I’m sure there were complexities involved in responding to his requests. But maybe ‘he wants to save a buck’ can’t be ruled out as being part of the decision-making process.
Is the Secret Service required to devote more resources when a candidate wants them to?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I think the situation is complicated by the fact that Trump is both a candidate and an ex-president. There’s never been such a person before in our lifetimes. The SS has responsibilities toward both of those people; I have no idea what the combination of the two entails.
I don’t doubt that some or most of those assholes were there to perform, but the fact remains that the questions I heard were reasonable in their substance. How many times had the Trump campaign been refused additional resources and for what reasons? Logistical questions about the day of the rally, that kind of thing.
If it was all performance, she made it easy for them. It was stuff she should have been prepped on. I didn’t hear any crazy questions, at least for the half hour or so I watched.
Congress funds the SS and they have an oversight responsibility. I don’t see anything partisan or inherently valueless in investigating the near-assassination of a major party presidential candidate. Should they have just shrugged and moved on?
I suspect they would have to be a bit cagey about answering such questions. If they are too descriptive of the codified procedures, how they adapt those to the venue, they run the risk of giving would-be assassins valuable information on how they operate.
I agree, the hearing was a disaster, but I don’t really blame Cheatle. I would strongly suspect she did exactly what she was told to do. It was a clown-show and nothing she could do would change that.
She could have thrown someone under the bus. Trump pointed out the obvious. If they had concerns he would have be fine waiting 15 minutes. Well they had concerns when they spotted someone with a range finder.
That precise fact pattern hasn’t happened before, but he’s not the first dual-status protectee. We also had the offspring of a former President who was simultaneously a candidate (and then himself President).