The sudden resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, the day after damning testimony before a U.S. House committee, has further fueled calls for a thorough investigation into the assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, predicted that “there will be further accountability through a full accounting of how these security failures occurred.”
“Abysmal security failures leading up to and during the Butler, Pennsylvania rally led to the attempted assassination of President Trump, the murder of an innocent victim, and harm to others in the crowd,” Comer said.
Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Christopher Parris added a major new detail to the mystery of the case on July 23, saying that would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots before being shot dead by a counter-sniper.
“Eight shell casings were recovered,” Parris told lawmakers during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing.
Rep. Eli Klain (R-Ariz.), a former Navy SEAL and sniper, asked Parris whether a team from Pennsylvania State Police had searched the Crooks home in Bethel Park.
“We believe we had personnel enlisted to secure it,” Paris said. “We also had bomb assets that we provided.”
Crane also asked whether state police noticed “anything suspicious” in the home, such as the lack of silverware or trash and the extreme cleanliness “almost like a medical lab.”
“We haven’t been given any of those details,” Paris said.
Cheatle’s four-hour appearance before the Comer committee the previous day revealed little about how Crooks came so close to executing the former president and leading 2024 presidential candidate. The testimony also highlighted a wealth of information about the July 13 tragedy that Cheatle said she did not know, as well as information she appears to have known but not revealed to Congress.
“Some of us here don’t have much confidence in the FBI.”
“The attempted assassination of President Trump requires urgent and comprehensive congressional oversight,” said Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “We must understand how it happened and make sure we make changes to ensure this never happens again.”
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) Bipartisan Bill He worked with Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada) to pass legislation requiring Senate confirmation of the nominee for director of the U.S. Secret Service.
“The Secret Service’s core mission is to protect the individuals placed under its custody,” Grassley said in a statement.
“President Trump’s near-death experience was an epic failure by the Secret Service, and this failure of duty must never be repeated,” Grassley said. “Our bill is an important step toward providing the transparency and accountability that Congress and the American people expect from the Secret Service.”
Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and current radio and podcast host, said investigators will soon determine how many times the Trump campaign has requested additional protection from the Secret Service but been turned down.
“Folks, this is going to get worse from here on out,” Bongino said on the podcast on July 23. “I assure you, we have the email history and we have the white papers. We have a long email history documenting multiple requests for increased security for Donald Trump’s security force, the DTD, that were denied and turned down. Kim Cheatle is not going to get away with it.”
“The Glenn Beck Bongino, the show’s host, said he has been called a conspiracy theorist over the past year for warning of an assassination attempt on President Trump.
“My point is, the failure here was so egregious that every single person on the advance team should have resigned the next day,” Bongino said. “The chief, the deputy chief, every single one of them. It’s unbelievable that they still have their jobs.”
“What are you hiding?”
Ten days after an assassination attempt that left one retired firefighter dead and two others seriously injured, the circumstances surrounding what happened at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds are eluding lawmakers.
Cheatle was asked multiple times how many rifle shell casings were recovered from the roof of Building 6 at the American Glass Research Complex, where Crooks attacked Trump and the rally crowd. He repeatedly deferred to the FBI, which is handling the criminal investigation, but later made it clear he knew more than he was letting on.
“Did they tell you how many shell casings were on the roof?” asked Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) When Rep. Cheatle tried to answer, Rep. McClain cut her off and repeated the question.
“Yes,” Cheatle replied.
“So they shared the information with you,” McClain said. “You just don’t want to share that information with us, right?”
McClain subsequently repeatedly asked Cheatle to reveal the number of shell casings recovered, but Cheatle would not budge.
“If you’re the person in charge, the responsibility is yours, so why can’t you share the answers?,” McClain asked. “What are you hiding?”
U.S. Secret Service agents surround former President Donald J. Trump after he was shot by an assassin at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
In response to questioning from Rep. Russell Frye of South Carolina, Cheatle said Secret Service radio communications from Trump rallies were not recorded or preserved. “There are no radio communications from that day,” he said.
A timeline of the shooting compiled by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) shows delays occurred between intelligence collected by local police and the Secret Service receiving and acknowledging it.
A photograph of Crooks taken by a local police counter-sniper at 5:14 PM (about an hour before the shooting) was not transmitted to the command center until 5:49 PM. The command center, which included Secret Service agents, did not acknowledge receipt of a local police message that they were searching for a suspicious person until 5:55 PM. Crooks opened fire on Trump and the crowd just after 6:11 PM.
Secret Service communications problems have been a recurring theme in the agency’s recent history, according to congressional sources. A report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General is expected to be released on January 6, 2021, which will identify Secret Service communications failures, a senior congressional aide told The Blaze News.
“The Joint Terrorism Task Force relies almost exclusively on anonymous tip-offs about ‘right-wing’ reactions to assassination attempts.”
Inspector General Joseph Caffari learned in December 2021 that the Secret Service had erased telephone text messages sent and received by employees on January 5 and 6, 2021, during a system transition. Caffari was heavily criticized by House Democrats for failing to notify the oversight committees in a timely manner.
Serious questions are being raised about the Secret Service’s actions at the scene of a pipe bomb discovery next to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. on the afternoon of January 6. After Capitol Police officers found the bomb near a park bench just outside the DNC building, security camera footage showed agents sitting in a car parked in a driveway finishing their lunch, then getting out of their SUV to investigate.
About 90 minutes earlier, a Secret Service guard escorted Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to the Democratic National Convention, parking her car in a garage just feet from the pipe bomb. The slow response by the Secret Service and local police after the bomb was discovered is being investigated by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).
Another key question Cheatle did not answer during the July 22 hearing was whether her agency or the FBI had tracked Crooks’ whereabouts in the days and months before the shooting.
“If the FBI is leading this investigation, we need to be confident that they’re leading a credible investigation, because some of us here don’t have a lot of confidence in the FBI,” Comer said.
Concerned about the FBI’s investigation into the Trump shooting, the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project launched its own assassination investigation, and some of its initial findings, released on July 22, showed that cellphones that accessed Crooks’ home and work addresses also rang from shopping malls and office buildings in Washington, D.C., where the FBI has offices.
Using commercially available location data, the Oversight Project also found that a cellphone believed to belong to Crooks had made two visits to Butler, Pennsylvania, 10 days before the Trump shooting.
“The Biden/Harris Administration did not adequately protect me and forced me to take the bullet for democracy.”
The phone was traveled from Crooks’ home in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, to Butler, where it was parked in the parking lot of a Home Depot store, according to the Oversight report.
According to the report released by Sen. Johnson, Crooks went to a Home Depot in Butler the morning of the shooting and purchased a 5.5-foot aluminum double ladder.
According to whistleblower and former FBI special agent Steve Friend, who was suspended for raising concerns about FBI tactics during the Jan. 6 incident and left the bureau in February 2023, the FBI appears more interested in blaming domestic extremists for the political violence than resolving the criminal investigation into Crooks.
“My @FBI spies have further confirmed that their joint terrorism task force is almost exclusively following anonymous tip-offs about ‘right wing’ reactions to assassination attempts,” Friend wrote to X. “A parallel, independent investigation is needed.”
The Oversight Project agrees and has asked for the public’s help in investigating the assassination attempt. Tips can be sent by email to tips.oversightproject@heritage.org.
“This is part of the reason we are conducting an independent investigation,” the Oversight Project posted on X. “The system cannot investigate itself.”
The F.B.I. update Based on research over the past 9 days.
President Trump posted new comments about the shooting on social media.
“The Biden/Harris Administration did not adequately protect me and I was forced to take a bullet for Democracy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It was a great honor for me to do so!”
Ronny Jackson, President Trump’s former physician, expressed frustration with people who are downplaying the severity of Trump’s gunshot wound.
“People forget how serious this was. A bullet traveling 3,300 feet per second was two centimetres away from hitting the back of his head,” Jackson told Fox News.
“I’m incredibly angry that people are trying to downplay what happened,” said Jackson, who examined Trump and reported that the former president was “recovering well and in good spirits.”
“By the grace of God, he was spared.”
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