Top secret intelligence officials are still refusing to answer basic questions surrounding the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, outraged Republican senators alleged after a Senate hearing presided over by the new acting director.
The hearing, held 17 days after an assassin’s bullet struck President Trump, featured Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Lowe and Deputy Director Paul Abbate, both of whom received higher marks than their disgraced predecessor, Kimberly Cheatle, but by lower standards of course, but it left senators with more questions than answers.
Check it out — President Trump praises the female Secret Service agents who protected him:
C-SPAN
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) argued that rising public anxiety amid a freezing economy and a broader collapse of trust in government institutions was due to “individual and systematic failures by the Secret Service on the day of the assassination attempt.”
“Back home, all anyone wants to talk about is the Secret Service’s failure,” he said, adding, “Because people back home don’t feel safe.”
Marshall called for an independent, non-political commission to “thoroughly investigate” the Secret Service’s failures and for President Joe Biden to immediately appoint a crisis management team to “go into the Secret Service, establish leadership, turn things around and begin to properly protect President Trump and others.”
“The Secret Service experienced a 48 percent turnover rate in one year,” he said. “Only 50 percent trust senior management. The Secret Service is negligent and incompetent. There are cultural deficiencies within the organization.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) blasted the CIA for refusing or failing to provide “basic information” about the July 13 assassination attempt 17 days later, including information “that frankly we should have known within hours.”
He blasted the Secret Service for believing it isn’t accountable to Congress and said local law enforcement agencies provide more answers than the Secret Service.
“Their guys just gave us a big middle finger,” he said of the Secret Service.
WATCH — Secret Service Director: No recording of radio traffic during assassination attempt on President Trump exists:
Oversight and Accountability Committee
Johnson urged the Secret Service whistleblower to contact his own staff, who are conducting their own investigation, but he insisted that the Secret Service’s top brass must cooperate fully as well.
“We need to have transcripts of interviews with all of the Secret Service personnel on the ground, all of the people involved in the plot,” he said. “We need those interviews quickly. We need them now because memories are fading and people may be affected.”
Johnson praised Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal (R-Conn.) and Gary Peters (R-Mich.), who joined the bipartisan call at the hearing.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) criticized the Secret Service for providing conflicting information about the shooter, who initially claimed to be a supporter of conservative policies, based on social media accounts he reportedly ran.
She said the latest description of the shooter was “someone with left-wing leanings. He supported illegal immigration. He supported lockdowns. He supported left-wing policies. So what we need to hear from the FBI is clarity on this.”
“There was no need for them to come and give testimony that contradicts their own allegations,” she said. “We need some certainty. I don’t know why they’re trying to nuance this. What we know is there was an assassination attempt on President Trump, and we want to know what happened.”
Blackburn echoed Johnson, calling on the whistleblower to come forward with information that Secret Service officials are hiding and also criticizing the culture within the agency. She discussed a whistleblower email that warned the Senate, “The current mission of the Secret Service is CYA, and all supervisors are practicing CYA. I believe this is completely inappropriate.”
She noted the urgency of the Secret Service’s mission, saying, “This is not like a federal agency that misses a caseload or a corporation that misses a revenue count. When the Secret Service fails, people die.”
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) laid out a series of questions the Secret Service should be able to answer but apparently cannot, including the identity of the agents in charge, the standard operating procedures that apply, and even the decision makers and the plan itself, among many other questions.
“If you can’t answer these simple questions, what are you hiding?” he asked.
Mullin reiterated that the senators’ complaints were with Secret Service leadership, not with agents in the field.
WATCH — “Well…that’s bullshit,” Rep. Nancy Mace slams Secret Service director for dodging questions:
Oversight and Accountability Committee
“I spoke with President Trump the day after the assassination attempt and I have to say the first thing he did was praise the Secret Service and the people who did the job,” Mullin recalled.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) praised the bravery of the agents at the scene but blasted “the Secret Service’s political leadership” and called July 13 “the worst and most catastrophic security failure the Secret Service has experienced since the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.”
He praised Rowe for doing a “slightly better job than his predecessor” during the hearing.
“Director Rowe at the very least acknowledged that there was no excuse for the failure to secure the rooftop where the shooter opened fire,” Cruz said. “That said, he continued a pattern of obstructionism by the Biden Administration.”
“Shortly after the shooting, an official Secret Service spokesperson tweeted, ‘The Trump Campaign never requested additional security. We never denied them additional security. In fact, we gave them additional security.’ We now know that tweet was a lie,” Cruz continued. “The person who said it, a Secret Service spokesperson, is still on the job. The Acting Director has refused to say whether he approved the tweet. The then-Director has also refused to say whether he approved the tweet.”
Cruz then blasted the acting secretary for not answering how many times Trump has requested additional protections and been denied. “He started saying, ‘Well, there’s a committee, and this committee goes to that committee,’ and it was a marvel of bureaucratic nonsense,” Cruz said.
“Apparently, the blame doesn’t stop with Biden’s Secret Service. No one is held accountable.”
Cruz later alleged that there were political motives that drove the Secret Service leadership’s decision.
I asked him: Are the people who denied additional insurance to President Trump the same people who denied insurance to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? There is absolutely no excuse for RFK going months without Secret Service protection. His father was assassinated while running for president. His uncle was assassinated while in office. RFK Jr. was the victim of multiple assassination attempts. And yet the Biden Administration refused to give him Secret Service protection until the assassination attempt on President Trump happened.
I believe the decision was political. I believe the decision was partisan, and that the Secret Service’s political leadership short-circuited President Trump for the same reasons they did not provide security for RFK Jr.
Cruz slammed the CIA for refusing to answer questions about how much more intelligence it has about Trump compared to Biden or the first lady, and how many threats have been directed at Trump compared to other people.
“A reasonable inference from the evidence available today is that political bias at the highest levels of the Secret Service led to a shortage of personnel and resources to protect President Trump. If this is true, we need to see a documented argument for why sufficient action was not taken to protect the president,” Cruz said.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) went further, suggesting the Secret Service should not have allowed Trump onto the stage after identifying a suspicious person with a rangefinder, and questioned why the Secret Service did not remove Trump from the stage when audience members and local police were aware there was a gunman with a rifle on the roof.
Lee mocked the department’s previous assertion that it had not stationed personnel on the roof because of safety procedures regarding the sloping roof – procedures that have since been proven false – and noted that “there was a severe lack of protection for the sloping roof today.”
Check out — “70-year-old man climbed” — Rep. Eli Klein’s thorough critique of the USSS’s pitched roof excuse:
“This is absurd, as are our multiple requests for additional protection from the Secret Service, which initially refused and never responded,” Lee said.
Lee and his colleagues denounced the police’s inability to answer basic questions or blame investigators far removed from the assassination attempt.
“Nobody wants to believe the worst or suspect the worst about what’s going on in our government,” he said, “but when they repeatedly lie to us, refuse to answer the most basic questions, and almost willfully refuse to take any of the most basic precautions to protect our president and, I hope, the next president of the United States, you can’t help but wonder.
Lee concluded his talk with a powerful and poignant biblical analogy.
“Remember, King David did not kill Uriah the Hittite himself,” he pointed out, “but he sent Uriah into battle knowing that he was at imminent risk of great bodily injury, and he ensured that Uriah did not receive adequate protection. We must get to the bottom of these questions to make sure that Donald Trump was not meant to become Uriah the Hittite.”
Bradley Jay is Capitol Hill correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter. translation:.
