Secret Service accountability

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 23rd of July. You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we thank you for joining us today. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up on The World and Everything in It: the Secret Service facing some accountability for the biggest fail in four decades.

The House Oversight Committee yesterday grilled Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle …

Republicans and Democrats alike peppered Cheatle. They had questions about her agency’s failure to prevent a would-be assassin from opening fire on former President Donald Trump.

Cheatle said she took responsibility for the failure, but side-stepped numerous questions.

REICHARD: Here now with more from that hearing is WORLD Radio’s Mary Muncy.

JAMES COMER: The Secret Service has a zero-fail mission and it failed on July 13th.....

MARY MUNCY: Representative James Comer told the House Oversight Committee that lawmakers are concerned the Secret Service lacks the “proper management” to protect their charges.

COMER: A little over a week ago, Americans watched in horror as a shooter attempted to assassinate President Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Thomas Crooks fired from the roof of a building about 400 feet away. He shot Trump in the ear, killed one rallygoer, and injured two others.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said that she takes responsibility, but said she would not resign.

KIMBERLY CHEATLE: I think that I am the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time.

Comer questioned Cheatle on why no one had secured the building Crooks shot from.

COMER: Wasn’t that building within the perimeter that should be secured. Do we agree with that?

CHEATLE: The building was outside the perimeter on the day of the visit. But again, that is one of the things that during the investigation we want to take a look at and determine whether or not other decisions should have been made.

Other lawmakers asked why Trump’s Secret Service detail allowed him to take the stage after local law enforcement identified a suspicious person about 20 minutes before his speech.

But Cheatle made a distinction between a threat and a suspicious person.

CHEATLE: If the detail had been passed information that there was a threat, the detail would never have brought the former president out onto stage.

Cheatle says law enforcement tried and failed to find Crooks before the shooting.

Lawmakers also questioned Cheatle about the weapons Crooks used, whether Cheatle’s hiring practices led to a lack of talented agents, and what she is using taxpayer dollars for.

There were also several questions that Cheatle said she couldn’t answer until the Secret Service and the FBI’s investigations are complete and that could take months.

So, in the meantime, how are events like the Butler rally supposed to be protected, and did the Secret Service take adequate precautions?

JEFF JAMES: Every site we went to there was a suspicious person.

Jeff James is a security adviser and a retired Secret Service Agent. He served on former President George W. Bush’s detail.

JAMES: You'd hear local law enforcement call it out, or our people would call it out, and we would send agents out to talk to that person. That's one of the disappointing things that happened last Saturday was that local law enforcement deemed this person suspicious, but nobody ever went over to him.

But James says the fact that there was someone deemed suspicious doesn’t necessarily mean that person has the means or intent to act.

JAMES: It's a very fine line, because if you run out there and grab the president by the back of his suit jacket and yank him off the stage, and you're wrong, it's incredibly embarrassing for the President. Embarrassing for you and but I gotta say, in big picture terms, it doesn't take much.

James says during his 22 years as a Secret Service agent his teams stopped several known assassination plots.

JAMES: The other part of it is, you don't know how many attacks you stop just by your presence.

But when it’s an outdoor space, it gets hard to have a presence everywhere.

JAMES: Heavy mortars can shoot from 9000 yards away. Medium mortars can shoot from 4000 yards away, and guess what? There is nothing you can do to stop it.

James didn’t secure the event in Butler, so he doesn’t know what went into establishing the perimeter. But he says eventually a team has to stop expanding the perimeter and rely on snipers and local law enforcement to secure the area.

Even if the Secret Service did take every precaution, this incident will likely prompt changes, like what happened after the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981.

THOMAS BAKER: The Secret Service changed a lot of their procedures after that.

Thomas Baker was the first FBI agent on the scene after that assassination attempt and the author of The Fall of the FBI.

Though people today might know a president or candidate is speaking somewhere, the itinerary isn’t published in the paper like it used to be.

BAKER: At these fixed locations, like a hotel where a president or some other protected person is talking, they started using metal detectors, then screen everybody coming in, in the crowd, through metal detectors.

During the hearing, Cheatle said the agency is already working on its own changes and that the Secret Service will release its report on what happened in about two months.

James isn’t sure replacing Cheatle would fix underlying problems, and he’ll be looking for whether the problem is systemic or a one-time security lapse.

JAMES: The possibility for a historic shift that would have affected American history for decades was literally one inch. I just want to make sure we don't lose sight of the of the tragedy that happened and the possible, you know, historic relevance of that moment.

Reporting for WORLD I’m Mary Muncy.

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