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in US PoliticsSecret Service chief berated in House hearing after Trump rally shooting
Lawmakers grilled the director of the US Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, during a contentious House hearing on Monday, where members of both parties called for her resignation in the wake of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump earlier this month.In her opening statement, Cheatle acknowledged the Secret Service had “failed” on 13 July, when a 20-year-old gunman was able to take a clear shot at the former president from a rooftop near Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.Trump survived but sustained an injury to his ear, and one rally attendee, former fire chief Corey Comperatore, was killed in the attack. Two others were injured.“As the director of the United States Secret Service, I take full responsibility for any security lapse of our agency,” Cheatle told the House oversight committee. “We are fully cooperating with ongoing investigations. We must learn what happened, and I will move heaven and earth to ensure that an incident like July 13th does not happen again.”In a particularly damning moment, Cheatle acknowledged that Secret Service agents were informed of a suspicious individual at the Trump rally “somewhere between two and five times” before the gunman opened fire.The Republican chair of the committee, James Comer, mourned the assassination attempt as “a horrifying moment in American history” and demanded that Cheatle offer her resignation.“While we give overwhelming thanks to the individual Secret Service agents who did their jobs under immense pressure, this tragedy was preventable,” Comer said. “It is my firm belief, Director Cheatle, that you should resign.”Lawmakers repeatedly pressed Cheatle on how such a galling security lapse could have occurred, but the director dodged many of their questions, reminding members that the investigation of the shooting was still in its earliest stages. When Cheatle again told Comer that she could not specify how many Secret Service agents were assigned to Trump on the day of the shooting, the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene interjected: “Why are you here?”Cheatle did deny allegations that the Secret Service rejected the Trump campaign’s demands for additional security on 13 July, telling lawmakers: “The assets that were requested for that day were given.”But Cheatle became more vague when the Republican congressman Jim Jordan pressed her on whether the Secret Service had denied past requests for additional security at Trump campaign events.“It looks like you won’t answer some pretty basic questions,” Jordan said. “And you cut corners when it came to protecting one of the most important individuals, one of the most well-known individuals on the planet.”Some Republicans representatives grew openly combative as they questioned Cheatle, with Nancy Mace telling the director: “You’re full of shit today.”Democratic members joined in on the criticism, and at least two of them, Jamie Raskin and Ro Khanna, echoed Republicans’ calls for Cheatle’s resignation. Khanna compared the situation to the fallout after an assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan in 1981.The then Secret Service director, Stuart Knight. stepped down in the months after the Reagan shooting.“Do you really believe that the majority of this country has confidence in you right now?” Khanna asked.Cheatle replied: “I believe that the country deserves answers, and I am committed to finding those answers and providing those answers.”Asked when more answers might be available, Cheatle said the agency hoped to conclude its internal investigation in 60 days, a timeline that sparked censure from committee members.“The notion of a report coming out in 60 days when the threat environment is so high in the United States, irrespective of party, is not acceptable,” said the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “This is not theater. This is not about jockeying. This is about the safety of some of the most highly targeted and valued targets – internationally and domestically – in the United States of America.”Raskin, the Democratic ranking member of the oversight committee, agreed with calls for accountability at the Secret Service while adding that lawmakers must reckon with the broader problem of gun violence in the US. He noted that the Trump campaign rally attack was not even the deadliest shooting on 13 July, as four people were killed later that day after a gunman opened fire at an Alabama night club.“What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a double failure: the failure by the Secret Service to properly protect Donald Trump and the failure of Congress to properly protect our people from criminal gun violence,” Raskin said. “We must, therefore, also ask hard questions about whether our laws are making it too easy for potential assassins and criminals to obtain firearms generally and AR-15 assault weapons specifically.”With Republicans in control of the House, it seems unlikely that a gun safety bill will pass Congress anytime soon. And after Cheatle’s performance on Monday, it seems even less likely that she will be able to hold on to her job for much longer. More
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in ElectionsHomeland Security Announces Panel on Trump Assassination Attempt
Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said the bipartisan group of experts would get to the bottom of decisions that allowed a gunman to wound the former president at a rally in Pennsylvania.The homeland security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, on Sunday announced the members of a panel to conduct an independent review into security failures after a gunman was able to wound former President Donald J. Trump last weekend at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.The Secret Service, which answers to Mr. Mayorkas, is facing criticism for its decisions in planning security for the event, and Republican leaders have called for the agency’s director, Kimberly A. Cheatle, to resign. Mr. Mayorkas’s announcement on Sunday promised that the panel would get to the bottom of what went wrong and what changes the Secret Service should make to protect the country’s leaders.“This independent review will examine what happened and provide actionable recommendations to ensure they carry out their no-fail mission most effectively and to prevent something like this from ever happening again,” Mr. Mayorkas said in a statement.The panel — described by Mr. Mayorkas as bipartisan — that will be conducting the 45-day review will be made up of Janet Napolitano, a former homeland security secretary; Frances Townsend, a former homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush; Mark Filip, a former federal judge and a deputy attorney general under Mr. Bush; and David Mitchell, a former secretary of the Delaware Department of Public Safety and Homeland Security. Mr. Mayorkas said he could invite additional experts to join the panel in the coming days.Ms. Cheatle said in a statement on Sunday that she was eager to cooperate with the review.The announcement comes as Mr. Mayorkas is under scrutiny for his handling of the events surrounding the assassination attempt, especially whether he has been able to get adequate answers from Ms. Cheatle. Her tenure grew more tenuous over the weekend after the Secret Service revised public comments that it had not denied requests for additional security for Mr. Trump the past two years.Ms. Cheatle is expected to testify on Monday before the House Oversight Committee and will face a barrage of questions about the Secret Service’s decisions before, during and immediately after the failed assassination on July 13. It is likely to be a pivotal moment in the search for what happened at the campaign rally and how federal law enforcement was unable to protect the former president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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in ElectionsSecret Service Says It Denied Earlier Trump Requests for More Federal Resources
In a reversal, a spokesman said the service had turned down requests from former President Donald J. Trump’s team over the past two years, though he said the requests did not include the recent rally in Pennsylvania.The Secret Service acknowledged on Saturday that it had turned down requests for additional federal resources sought by former President Donald J. Trump’s security detail in the two years leading up to his attempted assassination last week, a reversal from earlier statements by the agency denying that such requests had been rebuffed.Almost immediately after a gunman shot at Mr. Trump from a nearby warehouse roof while he spoke at a rally in Butler, Pa., last weekend, the Secret Service faced accusations from Republicans and anonymous law enforcement officials that it had turned down requests for additional agents to secure Mr. Trump’s rallies.“There’s an untrue assertion that a member of the former president’s team requested additional resources and that those were rebuffed,” Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said last Sunday, the day after the shooting.Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, said on Monday that the accusation that he had issued the denials was “a baseless and irresponsible statement and it is one that is unequivocally false.”On Saturday, Mr. Guglielmi acknowledged that the Secret Service had turned down some requests for additional federal security assets for Mr. Trump’s detail. Two people briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that the Trump campaign had been seeking additional resources for the better part of the time that Mr. Trump had been out of office. The denied requests for additional resources were not specifically for the rally in Butler, Mr. Guglielmi said.U.S. officials previously said the Secret Service had enhanced security for the former president before the Butler rally because it had received information from U.S. intelligence agencies about a potential Iranian assassination plot against Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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in ElectionsAt Trump Rally, Few Local Police Officers in Critical Area Before Shooting
Local law enforcement officials, present in abundance, said they were not assigned security duties around a warehouse used by a man who tried to kill former President Donald Trump.A key question after an assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump a week ago is why the Secret Service excluded from its secured zone a nearby warehouse the gunman used for his assault.But another possible flaw in the Secret Service’s plans for the campaign rally at the farm show grounds in Butler, Pa., is emerging. The protection agency expected the sizable contingent of officers from local law enforcement agencies to contain any threats outside of the secured zone but assigned almost all those officers to work inside it, according to numerous interviews with local law enforcement and municipal officials.None of the law enforcement agencies that assisted the Secret Service that day — the Pennsylvania State Police, the Butler Township Police Department, the Butler County Sheriff, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police or the multicounty tactical teams — say they were given responsibility for watching the zone outside the Secret Service’s security perimeter.More specifically, the local law enforcement officials say that none of them were assigned to safeguard the complex of warehouses just north of the farm show grounds. The gunman was able to use the roof of the warehouse closest to the stage — about 450 feet from the podium — from which to shoot.“I am going to defend those guys, because it wasn’t their job to secure the building,” said Richard Goldinger, the district attorney in Butler County, who oversees the multicounty tactical teams that were used at the rally, on July 13.Rather, an overwhelming majority of the dozens of local and state officers called upon to aid the Secret Service were given other duties at or inside the secured perimeter — an area that was protected by a fence, metal detectors and the Secret Service itself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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in ElectionsA Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump
About an hour before a gunman let loose a volley of bullets that nearly assassinated a former president, the law enforcement contingent in Butler, Pa., was on the verge of a great policing success.Among the thousands of people streaming in to cheer former President Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday, local officers spotted one skinny young man acting oddly and notified other law enforcement. The Secret Service, too, was informed, through radio communication. The suspicious man did not appear to have a weapon.Remarkably, law enforcement had found the right man — Thomas Matthew Crooks, a would-be assassin, though officers did not know that at the time. Then they lost track of him.Twenty minutes before violence erupted, a sniper, from a distance, spotted Mr. Crooks again and took his picture.As time slipped away, at least two local officers were pulled from traffic detail to help search for the man. But the Secret Service, the agency charged with protecting Mr. Trump, did not stop him from taking the stage. Eight minutes after Mr. Trump started to speak, Mr. Crooks fired off bullets that left the Republican presidential nominee bloodied and a rally visitor dead.Secret Service snipers surveilling the surrounding area before Mr. Trump began to speak.Eric Lee/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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in US PoliticsEx-Secret Service agents say ‘massive realignment’ warranted after Trump rally shooting
Former US Secret Service agents spent the early aftermath of what authorities say was an attempt to assassinate Donald Trump at a political rally on Saturday speaking out about what might have prevented their previous employer from failing to halt the shooter before he opened fire.Evy Poumpouras, who served in the Secret Service’s presidential protective division during Barack Obama’s time in the White House, told NBC’s Today show that rallies like the one this weekend – in a relatively exposed rural tract of Butler county, Pennsylvania – “are the most anxious you’re ever going to be as an agent because you’re trying to secure all of it”.In her remarks Sunday, the author and journalist suggested local- and state-level law enforcement officers who collaborate with the Secret Service for such events were likely the first line of defense in the area surrounding the Trump rally venue – a position reportedly confirmed by agency spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi.At Saturday’s rally, a man with a rifle was able to climb atop the roof of a bottle manufacturing plant and fire several shots at the former president at a distance of only about 165 yards.Multiple people who were outside the venue but near that building – listening to Trump campaign for another presidency – reported trying to point out the gunman to police officers stationed there. But Poumpouras said a key question to answer moving forward is to determine whether those people were directly speaking to officers or if they were unsuccessfully trying to get their attention.“When you’re doing these rallies, you’re looking at thousands of people,” said Poumpouras, who surmised the shooter waited to get into position until after Trump began speaking and commanded the bulk of rally goers’ attention. “How much law enforcement do you have? Do you have one law enforcement official to – what – 1,000 [attendees]? And are they able to get that person’s attention?”The Associated Press said it was told by two law enforcement officials that a local police officer tried to confront Crooks on the roof before the shooting. But the officer retreated after Crooks pointed a rifle at him, and within moments the attacker fired toward Trump.One ex-commander of the Long Beach, California, police department’s special tactics team told NBC it was “a fundamental security failure” to allow someone on a rooftop so near the rally Saturday.Poumpouras also said government officials are in store for difficult conversations about whether they provide enough resources to adequately secure such gatherings. She said it wasn’t uncommon for her to solicit a certain number of agents to protect a certain occasion only to be told there wasn’t enough money or manpower to fulfill that request.“This all costs something,” she said.Once the shooting erupted, former Secret Service agent Jeff James said agents largely responded appropriately with respect to shielding Trump, who had a bullet wound to the tip of his right ear. Counter-snipers fired back at the gunman, mortally wounding him after he apparently killed one spectator and badly injured two others.Agents quickly draped themselves over Trump after he fell on the stage, prepared to put themselves between the former president and any other gunshots aimed at him.In an interview with Pennsylvania news station WTAE, James faulted agents for how long it took them to whisk Trump away and into an armored vehicle. Trump put his shoes back after they had been knocked off his feet, took a few moments to defiantly raise his fist and then repeatedly mouthed the word “fight” to his supporters before agents managed to get him out of view.“There may have been four more gunmen who were going to start opening fire,” James – who estimated that Trump came within three inches of being shot squarely in the face – told WTAE. “We always treat that attack as if that is just the precursor, and the real attack is still to come.”Ultimately, Saturday warranted “an intensive review” of Trump’s security along with “a massive realignment”, ex-Secret Service agent Joseph LaSorsa – who protected former presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush – told Reuters.To that end, Joe Biden said Sunday he had ordered the Secret Service to ensure that Trump has adequate security, including at the Republican national convention beginning Monday in Milwaukee. The president also said he had ordered an independent review of security at the Trump rally.Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service director, has been invited to testify before Congress on 22 July.Trump’s assassination attempt was arguably the low point of a tumultuous last decade for the Secret Service. As documented by the Washington Post, the agency had previously drawn scrutiny after high-ranking members allegedly drove drunk through the White House grounds, struck a barricade and sped past a package dropped by a woman who had claimed to be “holding a … bomb”.The package contained a book, but that hardly quelled outrage, with other scandals ensnaring the Secret Service, which also investigates certain financial crimes.There were agents who purportedly hired prostitutes in Colombia and allowed a fence-jumper at the White House to get well into the building. Agents also took four days to realize a sniper fired shots at the White House, and they somehow allowed a man carrying a gun to share an elevator with Obama.Saturday was the first time a president or leading party Oval Office candidate had been shot since the 1981 attack on Ronald Reagan outside a hotel in Washington DC.The most recent of four assassinated US presidents was John F Kennedy in 1963. The assassination of his fellow Democrat and brother Robert F Kennedy in 1968 while he pursued their party’s White House nomination resulted in presidential candidates being afforded the protection of the Secret Service.Pleas from Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to be provided Secret Service protection himself as he runs an independent presidential campaign ahead of November’s election received an infusion of support after the attack at Trump’s rally Saturday, as Politico reported. More
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in ElectionsRoban a un agente del Servicio Secreto la noche de la gala de Biden en Los Ángeles
El agente fue encañonado en el condado de Orange. El robo fue la misma noche en que Biden estaba en California recaudando fondos para campaña.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Un agente del Servicio Secreto de Estados Unidos fue atracado a punta de pistola en el sur de California durante el fin de semana, la misma noche en que el presidente Joe Biden se encontraba en Los Ángeles para recaudar fondos para su reelección, informaron el lunes las autoridades.Los agentes de policía recibieron una llamada de un conjunto residencial en el condado de Orange sobre las 9:36 p. m. del sábado por informes de un posible robo, dijo el Departamento de Policía de Tustin en un comunicado.Al llegar a la urbanización —una antigua base militar—, la policía descubrió que la víctima era un agente del Servicio Secreto al que le habían robado el bolso a punta de pistola, según el comunicado. Durante el robo, un agente disparó un arma, añadió la policía.El presunto robo se produjo la misma noche en que Biden asistía en el centro de Los Ángeles a un acto estelar de recaudación de fondos para la reelección con el expresidente Barack Obama. Celebridades como George Clooney, Julia Roberts y Barbra Streisand asistieron a la gala, en la que, según la campaña de Biden, se recaudaron al menos 28 millones de dólares.No estaba claro si el agente del Servicio Secreto estaba en California protegiendo a Biden o a Obama. El comunicado de la policía no identificaba al agente. El Departamento de Policía de Tustin no respondió inmediatamente a las solicitudes de aclaración.No se sabe cuántos sospechosos estaban implicados o si resultaron heridos durante el tiroteo, según el comunicado que afirmaba que no se había encontrado a ningún sospechoso. La policía pudo localizar algunas pertenencias del agente en la zona.El Servicio Secreto de EE. UU. no respondió inmediatamente a las peticiones de comentarios.Yan Zhuang es un corresponsal del Times que cubre noticias de última hora más sobre Yan ZhuangContenido relacionado: https://www.nytimes.com/es/2024/04/23/espanol/donald-trump-carcel.html More