Embattled Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle has revealed the fateful reason why her agency failed to position an agent on top of the building that a gunman used to carry out an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Cheatle, who is already facing calls to resign over what some lawmakers are calling a massive security failure, said Secret Service officials planning security for Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania considered the warehouse about 150 yards away from where Trump spoke to be a risky position for stationing an agent.
‘That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,’ she told ABC News in an interview Tuesday.
‘And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.’
What transpired instead was a security nightmare: Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to scale the building and secure his own position, while law enforcement struggled to locate him even amid pressing warnings from members of the Trump crowd. But there wasn’t sufficient time to act on the tips, she explalined.
‘The shooter was actually identified as a potential person of suspicion,’ Cheatle said. ‘Unfortunately, with the rapid succession of how things unfolded, by the time that individual was eventually located, they were on the rooftop and were able to fire off at the former president.’
They don’t put agents on the roof because it has a gentle slope? You’ve got to be kidding me!
There is a reason the press calls murderers “suspected” or “alleged” murderers before they’ve been tried and convicted. There is a reason that, when popping sounds are heard at a rally and blood streams down a former president’s face, the media reports just that – and doesn’t jump to the conclusion that those popping sounds were gunshots and the blood caused by a bullet. The reason is an absence of certainty.
Critics have also complained that some outlets refrained from immediately deeming the shooting an “assassination attempt.” But as NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell explained: “Our reporting guidelines require that we not use that term until law enforcement describes it as an assassination attempt if/when the investigation supports that designation. It is a measured approach for accuracy.”
Anyone familiar with high-powered rifles could have heard the pops on TV and seen the blood streaming on Trump’s face and realized within five seconds there was an assassination attempt. I don’t see the necessity of waiting for some law enforcement bureaucracy to make that pronouncement.
OJ Simpson murdered two people even though a criminal jury found him not guilty. Bureaucracies are not God. They are not the seal of truth. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong.
This is part of the neutralization of life that has taken off since the 30 Years War in the 17th Century. More and more of life has been removed from the political (religion, race, immigration, nationalism) and turned over to experts (see Stephen Turner’s book Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts).
