Gerald Posner, an investigative journalist who has become an authority on political assassinations after thoroughly investigating the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., says he understands why many people think there’s something fishy about the official announcement of an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
“They refused to give Trump additional protection for two years?” Posner asked, referring to the Secret Service’s belated admission that Trump’s security team was denied resources it had requested before the July 13 assassination attempt. “They were creating a situation in which someone could open fire. I’m not saying they were, but I can understand why there’s such speculation.”
In the latest episode of “Drill Down,” a podcast with Peter Schweitzer and Eric Eggers, Posner offered his analysis of the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left one man dead, two others seriously injured, and former President Trump injured.
Posner has been following the hearings about Secret Service missteps and has a lot of questions: “We knew there had been missteps before, but they couldn’t keep quiet anymore because people at the rally were pulling out their cell phones and starting recording what was going on. ‘Hey, there he is! There’s that guy! Look at that guy on the roof! Hey officer!’ So we know more than they’re telling us. It’s no wonder we think something is fishy.”
“The police were tracking him before the attack, and the Secret Service found out, and they said they knew about it 30 minutes before,” Posner said. “Why did they allow Trump to go on stage?”
Posner is the author of a thorough investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.Case solved,” and “Killing dreams“, A book about civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He and his wife, Patricia, carefully reviewed the records surrounding both assassinations and concluded that both Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray acted alone.
The new acting director of the US Secret Service, Ronald Lowe, called the assassination attempt on former President Trump “Secret Service FailureHe places the blame on the “shooter,” not the local police. A joint Senate hearing this week is examining how 20-year-old Thomas Michael Crooks, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, was able to get so close to Trump and fire eight shots at him, even as spectators apparently yelled to police that they saw the shooter on a rooftop near Trump’s podium.
“This is a major failure of communication,” Posner told the hosts. “We don’t know yet whether the attacker had any other accomplices. We’re going to find out. Was he encouraged to do this by other people? Did he have any cooperation?” Posner asked.
There were also major procedural failures. “By the way, there’s a water tower over there. I looked into that in detail. This tower has 360-degree coverage of that entire area. We could have had someone stationed at that water tower. That was discussed but obviously never done,” he said. “One of the things we now know is that the Secret Service never had a meeting with local or state police before this incident happened. Is this something that’s been done a lot over the past two years with other security issues, or is it something that’s specific to this incident and to Trump?”
To make matters worse, the Navy says it has already purged the radio communications from its archives as “standard operating procedure.”
Schweitzer says the Secret Service’s failures may be starting to look like “willful incompetence” to some. Posner recalls revelations that key FBI officials harbored personal animosity toward Trump during his presidency, and asks, “Will we ever find personal emails, or emails to the government, from senior Secret Service officials saying, ‘I can’t stand that lousy ex-president, I just don’t like him?'”
After watching the testimony of Rowe and former board member Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned in disgrace after appearing before a House of Commons committee last week, it would be easy for the public to conclude that “we know a lot more.” [about the situation] than what they’re telling us.”
After Schweitzer and Eggers shared that FBI Director Christopher Wray had casually said in his testimony that he “had doubts” whether Trump was hit by a bullet or shrapnel, Posner agreed that “it’s understandable why people have doubts.”
These hearings are do not have “If you’re a public official, you have an obligation to disclose information,” Posner told the moderator. “The whole system was paralyzed.”
Posner isn’t a fan of conspiracy theories — “I’ve never underestimated incompetence at the highest levels of government” — but he does think that the police’s use of bodyguards who are a head shorter than Trump raises obvious questions about police priorities. “If President Trump had been fatally shot in the head as he was being escorted to his car, and he was shot because there were no bodyguards around, where would we be right now?” he asks. “We would think it was a total conspiracy.”
Americans are accustomed to rapid briefings from government officials immediately after a plane crash, hurricane or other catastrophe, so the way a top Secret Service official would ignore information and display ignorance even in front of Congress comes as a shock to many. “The agency is scrambling to hide the information that is most embarrassing to them,” Posner said.
To make matters worse, the service’s former director testified before Congress last week that the USSS routinely deletes radio recordings after incidents — apparently there was no order from senior officials to preserve radio communications in the event of such a security blunder.
“There was testimony. [Tuesday] “Secret Service practice and standard operating procedure is to never preserve these remote communications when covering a candidate’s rallies or events. There is nothing unusual about the fact that the communications were not preserved,” he said.
“That’s wrong,” Posner argued.
“There should be an order from headquarters saying ‘don’t delete anything, save everything’ because you would want to look at the data yourself to determine what happened, if there were any flaws, and what needs to be fixed going forward. The fact that it was deleted as ‘standard operating procedure’ is not a satisfactory answer.”
Posner compares the Butler shooter’s focus to that of Oswald, who remained focused and fired eight shots even after telling police he could see the crowd on the rooftops: “Oswald had just turned 24 a month before the Kennedy motorcade passed by his workplace. He had never seen a presidential motorcade. And when it finally came into view and he saw Jackie and the governor of Texas there, it hit home and he missed the first shot. The second shot was not fatal. He should have stayed with the motorcade, not panicked, not moved, not run off to get that final shot in the head,” he says.
“Crooks, the 20-year-old shooter (Butler), was on the roof and could hear people. He could have heard people screaming on the ground minutes before: ‘There he is! Officer, I see him!’ It could have been easy to panic… What did Crooks do after that? He didn’t just fire his gun. 8 shots“That’s remarkable, and no one in Secret Service communications is saying, ‘Gun! Gun! Gun!’ Their reaction is slower than we would have hoped,” he said.
How does the Secret Service under Kennedy compare to the one he studied today? Has it improved or worsened? Do government policies such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” affect the Secret Service’s ability to do its job?
“In the murky security architecture of the Department of Homeland Security, this budget gets lost. The budget is $3.1 billion. About a third of that goes to security, but there are more people to cover because we have more living former presidents. But at the same time, it seems to me like there is a DEI component to this that needs to be explored. So I can’t tell you today, ‘Yes, because they set a standard that requires 30 percent women.’ [agents]Or they decide they need 15% of agents of color.”
But as investigative journalists, “we have biases when we approach something. Genuine The hardest thing about being a journalist is Opposition “It’s not what I originally thought. My bias was that the DEI was one of the factors that contributed to what I would call a decline in the quality of the Secret Service. But now I have to look at it and see if that’s really the case,” Posner concluded.
Listeners can follow Posner Twitter/X Website To find out more about his books and other writings.
For more articles by Peter Schweitzer, Drill down Podcast.
