Trump Assassination Attempt: New Report Raises More Questions Than Answers

Today marks the first anniversary of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life at his campaign rally in Butler, Pa. To make the occasion, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report on the Secret Service errors and lapses of judgment that led to the shooter, Thomas Crooks, to be able to get Trump in his sights and have a clear, unobstructed, easy shot. If Trump hadn’t turned his head at the very moment of the shot, he would have been killed on that day. And as damning as the new report is, it demonstrates definitively that the corrupt system that made the assassination attempt possible is still very much in place.

Fox News reported Saturday that “ten days before the event, high-level Secret Service officials were briefed on a classified threat to Trump. ‘Once those officials reviewed the intelligence, they could have then requested that personnel within their chain of command be briefed on the specific information.’”

But they didn’t. “Officials failed to share this information, leaving federal and local law enforcement entities planning and staffing the event unaware of the active threat, including members of the Donald Trump Protective Division.”

The big question here is why the Secret Service decided to sit on this threat. What were the political views of the officials responsible for the decision not to brief others within the chain of command? Were they leftists? Did they want Trump dead? Were officials in the Biden White House and the Democrat Party questioned regarding any possible connection to concealing this information? These are the kinds of questions that a really useful report would be answering, although the GAO’s report is damning enough even despite its careful avoidance of such matters.

The people assigned to protect the once and future president, meanwhile, were green and untested: “The Secret Service agent who was responsible for ‘identif[ying] site vulnerabilities,’ was new to her role. The Butler event was ‘her first time planning and securing a large outdoor event as the site agent.’” What an amazing stroke of bad luck, that on her first day in this important role, there is an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate! Or was that day chosen for this shooting precisely because someone knew that Trump would be more vulnerable than he had been previously?

Also, “at the time of the Butler event, the Secret Service lacked a formal policy for communicating a protectee staff’s requests for changes to security plans. A Trump campaign staffer had asked the Secret Service advance team, who was unaware of the active threat to Trump, not to use large farm equipment to address line-of-sight concerns near one of the buildings so as not to interfere with campaign press photos. The advance team complied, a decision which may have given Crooks a clearer shot at the stage from his rooftop perch.”

As such things so often do, this gets worse: “Secret Service officials denied the Donald Trump Protective Division’s request for enhanced counter Unmanned Aerial Surveillance (cUAS) equipment at the Butler event, as ‘these resources had already been allocated for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.’ Fortunately, senior officials with knowledge of the threat against Trump stepped in to approve counter sniper assets for the rally, a decision which was described as ‘inconsistent’ with agency practices for making resource decisions.” Absent this last-minute decision, Trump ‘would likely not have received the counter sniper assets that ultimately took out [Crooks],’ the GAO wrote.”

After all these serious lapses, what was done? Was the Secret Service given a thorough housecleaning, and all agents removed who may have wanted to see mistakes made as Trump spoke in Butler? No. Instead, the response has been a small series of slaps on the wrist: six Secret Service agents were suspended without pay for periods of between 10 and 42 days. That’s it.

The assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pa. was more than suspicious in light of the left’s relentless attempts to destroy him via lawfare and false charges of “insurrection” and “Russian collusion.” It’s very clear that the leftist elites wanted Trump neutralized forever. Would they have stopped at trying to kill him? A thoroughgoing, honest investigation is needed, not some token suspensions of Secret Service agents. Why hasn’t that investigation begun?