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‘Fingers Being Pointed’: Secret Service’s Explanations For Security Failures Ahead Of Trump Assassination Attempt Aren’t Adding Up

Published

12 months ago

12 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By KATELYNN RICHARDSON

 

Secret Service’s explanations for the security failures surrounding the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a rally on Saturday aren’t adding up, according to security experts and former Secret Service agents.

Emerging details highlight what seems to be a disconnect between local officials and Secret Service, while making it more apparent that there were major oversights. Many key questions hinge on the responsibilities delegated to local police, who U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle confirmed during a Monday interview with ABC News were inside the building the shooter fired from, though nobody was stationed on the rooftop.

Cheatle explained a decision was made not to put anybody on top of the building because the “sloped” roof made it unsafe, but security experts and former Secret Service agents who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation emphasized not having someone on the roof was a “big failure” and didn’t believe Cheatle’s explanation was sufficient.

“Let’s just say the local law enforcement officers [and] the Secret Service agree that it’s just not safe to keep someone up there for a couple of hours,” former Secret Service agent Anthony Cangelosi told the DCNF. “Then the question is, well, how do we maintain its integrity otherwise? It’s not like you just throw your hands up and say ‘can’t do that.’”

Cangelosi said there is no “justifiable reason” for failing to cover the roof, suggesting they should have found solutions like putting another platform up or getting an officer on a lift.

Peter Yachmetz, retired FBI agent and principal security consultant at Yachmetz Consulting Group, pointed out that the shooter was moving around on the “unsafe” roof prior to the incident.

“The slope didn’t affect him,” Yachmetz told the DCNF.

Law enforcement reportedly spotted the shooter on the roof 30 minutes before shots were fired, WPXI reported Monday. After the incident, a witness described watching a man climbing onto the roof and trying to warn a police officer, claiming officials responded with confusion.

“The reality is, regardless of the spin, that particular roof should have been under constant surveillance and or posted,” former secret service agent Tim Miller told the DCNF.

 

“In this particular instance, we did share support for that particular site and that the Secret Service was responsible for the inner perimeter,” Cheatle told ABC News Monday during an interview. “And then we sought assistance from our local counterparts for the outer perimeter. There was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.”

However, a local law enforcement official told The New York Times Tuesday that the local forces were in an adjacent building, not the one the shooter was firing from.

The discrepancies in their accounts only add to the uncertainties surrounding who was responsible.

CBS News reported Monday that there were three snipers stationed inside the building shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks fired from, citing a local law enforcement officer. One of the snipers saw Crooks looking through a rangefinder in the minutes before he fired and radioed command post, according to CBS News.

The Butler Township Police Department declined to confirm the report to the DCNF, stating that there is an ongoing investigation by the FBI.

Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe declined to offer additional comments Tuesday, telling the DCNF he is “backing away from media requests for comment and opinions.”

“There are too many questions being posed that I do not have first hand knowledge of and too many fingers being pointed,” he said. “I am in charge of the Deputy Sheriffs and no other law enforcement agency. My Deputies performed their duties at their assigned areas and went above and beyond after the shooting started and ended in the their actions to help people and assist police in clearing the nearby buildings.”

Slupe previously confirmed to CNN that an armed Butler Township officer encountered Crooks before he shot at Trump, but retreated down the ladder after Crooks pointed his gun at him. He told KDKA-TV there was a security failure, but noted “there is not just one entity responsible.”

“The Secret Service plays a key role in protecting, in this case, former President Trump, but they don’t act alone,” he told the outlet. “The Secret Service receives support from local police departments.”

Pennsylvania State Police, however, did confirm they had no members “inside the building or staging in it.”

“The Pennsylvania State Police provided all resources that the United States Secret Service (USSS) requested for former President Trump’s rally in Butler on Saturday, July 13th, including approximately 30 to 40 troopers to assist with securing the inside perimeter,” Pennsylvania State Police Lieutenant Adam Reed told the DCNF. “Among PSP’s duties at the rally, the Department was not responsible for securing the building or property at AGR International.”

Reed said he could not say when an officer witnessed the shooter, as it was not a state trooper who saw him.

 

Former secret service agent Jeffrey James explained to the DCNF that protection “works in a series of concentric circles.” Typically, there is an inner circle of secret service agents, a second circle that mixes both agents and local law enforcement, and an outer ring that is largely state and local partners.

If the agent in charge of the site told a local law enforcement officer on the outer perimeter that the building is his responsibility, then anything that happens is on the officer.

“But if that agent didn’t find one of the local law enforcement partners and give very clear, direct directions…then it’s going to be the responsibility or the fault of that agent for not delegating that,” he told the DCNF.

It’s unclear what instructions the Secret Service gave to local law enforcement.

Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger told The Washington Post Tuesday that “Secret Service was in charge” and that “it was their responsibility to make sure that the venue and the surrounding area was secure.”

“For them to blame local law enforcement is them passing the blame when they hold the blame, in my opinion,” Goldinger told The Washington Post.

However, the Secret Service released a statement on Tuesday pushing back against assertions that they were blaming local law enforcement for the tragedy that unfolded on Saturday. “Any news suggesting the Secret Service is blaming local law enforcement for Saturday’s incident is simply not true,” the statement posted to the Secret Service’s X page said.

“I am having difficulty reconciling the answer the Director gave in her ABC interview with the official statement made on social media,” Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said in a press release on Tuesday. “Our goal is to provide whatever assistance the Secret Service needs to perform their mission and to do so with mutual respect, trust, and accuracy.”

A RealClearPolitics report suggested Sunday that resources were diverted away from Trump’s rally to an event where First Lady Jill Biden was speaking. Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the United States Secret Service, denied this was the case.

Questions also remain about why Crooks was not taken out sooner. Cangelosi explained to the DCNF that counter-snipers can face challenges due to their distance from the target.

“With counter snipers, you’re usually so far away, it’s not usually clear whether an individual is an imminent threat, ” Cangelosi said. “It’s harder to discern. Once they discern whether that person is a threat to life or serious bodily injury, they can take the shot.”

Yachmetz questioned why drone coverage was not utilized.

“A drone strategically placed a few thousand feet above could have oversaw the entire venue,” he said.

“In my opinion, a detailed, in-depth very specific investigation must be conducted of all procedures [and] this entire matter by a non-biased outside investigative group (possibly of retired agents),” Yachmetz told the DCNF, emphasizing the investigation must not be “politically motivated.”

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer announced Monday that Cheatle would testify at a committee hearing on July 22. President Joe Biden said Sunday that he directed an “independent review” of the events.

The FBI told the DCNF it has “nothing additional to provide at this time beyond previously-issued statements.” The Bureau said Monday that it gained access to Crooks’ phone and “has conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses.”

Trump suffered a wound to his ear, and two were killed, including Crooks and 50-year-old ex-volunteer fire chief, Corey Comperatore. Two other attendees were also wounded the attack.

Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment.

Wallace White and Owen Klinsky contributed to this report.

Featured image credit: (Screen Capture/CSPAN)

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Dallas mayor invites NYers to first ‘sanctuary city from socialism’

Published on July 5, 2025

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From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

After the self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor in New York, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson invited New Yorkers and others to move to Dallas.

Mamdani has vowed to implement a wide range of tax increases on corporations and property and to “shift the tax burden” to “richer and whiter neighborhoods.”

New York businesses and individuals have already been relocating to states like Texas, which has no corporate or personal income taxes.

Johnson, a Black mayor and former Democrat, switched parties to become a Republican in 2023 after opposing a city council tax hike, The Center Square reported.

“Dear Concerned New York City Resident or Business Owner: Don’t panic,” Johnson said. “Just move to Dallas, where we strongly support our police, value our partners in the business community, embrace free markets, shun excessive regulation, and protect the American Dream!”

Fortune 500 companies and others in recent years continue to relocate their headquarters to Dallas; it’s also home to the new Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE). The TXSE will provide an alternative to the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq and there are already more finance professionals in Texas than in New York, TXSE Group Inc. founder and CEO James Lee argues.

From 2020-2023, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA reported the greatest percentage of growth in the country of 34%, The Center Square reported.

Johnson on Thursday continued his invitation to New Yorkers and others living in “socialist” sanctuary cities, saying on social media, “If your city is (or is about to be) a sanctuary for criminals, mayhem, job-killing regulations, and failed socialist experiments, I have a modest invitation for you: MOVE TO DALLAS. You can call us the nation’s first official ‘Sanctuary City from Socialism.’”

“We value free enterprise, law and order, and our first responders. Common sense and the American Dream still reside here. We have all your big-city comforts and conveniences without the suffocating vice grip of government bureaucrats.”

As many Democratic-led cities joined a movement to defund their police departments, Johnson prioritized police funding and supporting law and order.

“Back in the 1800s, people moving to Texas for greater opportunities would etch ‘GTT’ for ‘Gone to Texas’ on their doors moving to the Mexican colony of Tejas,” Johnson continued, referring to Americans who moved to the Mexican colony of Tejas to acquire land grants from the Mexican government.

“If you’re a New Yorker heading to Dallas, maybe try ‘GTD’ to let fellow lovers of law and order know where you’ve gone,” Johnson said.

Modern-day GTT movers, including a large number of New Yorkers, cite high personal income taxes, high property taxes, high costs of living, high crime, and other factors as their reasons for leaving their states and moving to Texas, according to multiple reports over the last few years.

In response to Johnson’s invitation, Gov. Greg Abbott said, “Dallas is the first self-declared “Sanctuary City from Socialism. The State of Texas will provide whatever support is needed to fulfill that mission.”

The governor has already been doing this by signing pro-business bills into law and awarding Texas Enterprise Grants to businesses that relocate or expand operations in Texas, many of which are doing so in the Dallas area.

“Texas truly is the Best State for Business and stands as a model for the nation,” Abbott said. “Freedom is a magnet, and Texas offers entrepreneurs and hardworking Texans the freedom to succeed. When choosing where to relocate or expand their businesses, more innovative industry leaders recognize the competitive advantages found only in Texas. The nation’s leading CEOs continually cite our pro-growth economic policies – with no corporate income tax and no personal income tax – along with our young, skilled, diverse, and growing workforce, easy access to global markets, robust infrastructure, and predictable business-friendly regulations.”

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conflict

US airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Was it obliteration?

Published on July 5, 2025

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A satellite image of the Isfahan nuclear research center in Iran shows visible damage to structures and nearby tunnel entrances from recent US airstrikes. / Satellite image (c) 2025 Maxar Technologies.

Seymour Hersh Seymour Hersh

The US attack on Iran may not have wiped out its nuclear ambitions but it did set them back years

I started my career in journalism during the early 1960s as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a now long-gone local news agency that was set up by the Chicago newspapers in the 1890s to cover the police and fire departments, City Hall, the courts, the morgue, and so on. It was a training ground, and the essential message for its aspiring reporters was: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

It was a message I wish our cable networks would take to heart. CNN and MSNBC, basing their reporting on an alleged Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, have consistently reported that the Air Force raids in Iran on June 22 did not accomplish their primary goal: total destruction of Iran’s nuclear-weapons capacity. US newspapers also joined in, but it was the two nominally liberal cable channels, with their dislike—make that contempt—for President Donald Trump, that drove the early coverage.

There was no DIA analysis per se. All US units that engage in combat must file an “after-action report” to the DIA after a military engagement. In this case, the report would have come from the US Central Command, located at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida. CENTCOM is responsible for all US military operations in the Middle East, Egypt, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. One US official involved in the process told me that “the first thing out of the box is you have to tell your boss what happened.” It was that initial report of the bombing attack that was forwarded to DIA headquarters along the Potomac River in Washington and copied or summarized by someone not authorized to do so and sent to the various media outlets.

The view of many who were involved in the planning and execution of the mission is that the report was summarized and leaked “for political purposes”—to cast immediate doubt on the success of the mission. The early reports went so far as to suggest that Iran’s nuclear program has survived incapacitation by the attack. Seven US B-2 “Spirit” bombers, each carrying two deep-penetration “bunker-busters” weighing 30,000 pounds, had flown without challenge from their base in Missouri to the primary target: Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility, concealed deep inside a mountain twenty miles north of the city of Qom.

The planning for the attack began with the knowledge that the main target—the working area of the nuclear program—was buried at least 260 feet below the rocky surface at Fordo. The gas centrifuges spinning there were repeatedly enriching uranium, in what is known as a cascade, not to weapons-grade level—uranium-235 isotopes enriched to 90 percent—but to 60 percent. Further processing to create weapons grade uranium, if Iran chose to do so, could be done in a matter of weeks, or less. The Air Force planning group had also been informed before the bombing raid, most likely by the Israelis, who have a vast spy network in Iran, that more than 450 pounds of the enriched gas stored at Fordo had been shipped to safety at another vital Iranian nuclear site at Isfahan, 215 miles south of Tehran. Isfahan was the only known facility in Iran capable of converting the Fordo gas into a highly enriched metal—a critical early stage of building the bomb. Isfahan also was a separate target of the US attack on Fordo, and was pulverized by Tomahawk missiles fired by a U.S. submarine operating in the Gulf of Aden, off Yemen.

As a journalist who for decades has covered the nascent nuclear crisis in the Middle East, it seemed clear to me and to informed friends I have in Washington and Israel that if Fordo somehow survived its bunker-buster attack, as was initially suggested, and continued to enrich more uranium, Isfahan would not. No enrichment, no Iranian bomb.

I’ve been frustrated and angry at cable news coverage for years, and that includes Fox News, too, and decided to try and find the real story. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And I checked out enough of it to share.

I was told that “the first question for the American planners was how big was the actual workspace at Fordo? Was it a structure? We had to find that out before we got rid of it.” Some of the planners estimated that the working space “was the size of two hockey rinks: 200 feet long and 85 feet wide.” It came to 34,000 square feet. The height of the underground working space was assumed to be ten-and-a-half feet—I was not told the genesis of that assumption—and the size of the target was determined to be 357,000 cubic feet.

The next step was to measure the power of the dozen or more bunker-busters that were planned to be “carefully spaced and dropped” by the US B-2 bombers, using the most advanced guidance systems. (During one high-level session in Washington, one of the Air Force planners was asked what would happen if the B-2’s guidance systems were corrupted by an outside signal. “We’d miss the target” was the answer.)

I was assured that even if the rough estimate of the working space at Fordo was far off, the bombers targeting Fordo each carried a 30,000-pound bomb with an explosive payload of as much as five thousand pounds, which was more than enough to pulverize the mythical hockey rinks, or even a much larger working space.

Some of the bombs were also outfitted with what is known as a hard target void sensing fuze, which enabled the bombs to penetrate multiple layers of a site like Fordo before detonating. This would maximize the destructive effect. Each bomb, dropped in sequence, would create a force of rubble that would cause increasing havoc in the working areas deep inside the mountain.

“The bombs made their own hole. We built a 30,000-pound steel bullet,” the official told me, referring with pride to the bunker-busters.

Most important, he said, was that there were no post-strike hints detected of radioactivity—more evidence that the 450 pounds of enriched uranium had been moved from Fordo to the reprocessing site at Isfahan prior to the US attack there, which was code-named “Midnight Hammer.” That operation included a third US strike at yet another nuclear facility at Natanz.

“The Air Force got everything on the hit list,” the official told me. “Even if Iran rebuilds some centrifuges, it will still need Isfahan. There is no conversion capability without it.”

Why not, I asked, tell the public about the success of the raid and the fact that Iran no longer has a potential nuclear weapon?

The answer: “There will be a top-secret report about all of this, but we don’t tell people how hard we work. We tell the public what we think it wants to hear.”

The US official, asked about the future of the Iranian nuclear program, quickly acknowledged that “there is a communication problem” when it comes to the fate of the program.

The intent of the strike planners, he said, “was to prevent the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon in the near term—a year or so—with the hope they would not try again. The clear understanding was that there was no expectation to ‘obliterate’ every aspect of their nuclear program. We don’t even know what that is.

“Obliteration means the glass—[eliminating] Iran’s nuclear program—is full. The planning and the results are the glass is half-full. For Trump critics, the results are the glass is half-empty—the centrifuges may have survived and four hundred pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium are missing. The bombs could not be assured to penetrate the centrifuge chamber . . . too deep, but they could cover them up [with rocks and other bomb debris] and in the process cause unknown damage to them.

“Whether the 60 percent [enriched uranium] was there or not is irrelevant because without centrifuges they cannot refine it to weapons grade. Add to this the research and refinement and conversion from gas to metal—required for a bomb—at Isfahan are also gone.

“Results? Glass is half-full . . . a couple of years of respite and uncertain future. So now Trump’s defense is Full Glass. Critics? Half-empty. Reality? Half-full. There you are.”

The immediate beneficiary of the use of US force in Iran will not be a more placid Middle East, but Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Air Force and army are still killing massive numbers of Palestinians in Gaza.

There remains no evidence that Iran was on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. But as the world has known for decades, Israel maintains a significant nuclear arsenal that it officially claims does not exist.

This is a story not about the bigger picture, which is muddled, but about a successful US mission that was the subject of a lot of sloppy reporting because of a reviled president. It would have been a breakthrough had anyone in the mainstream press spoken or written about the double standard that benefits Israel and its nuclear umbrella, but in America that remains a taboo.

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