Trump Assassination Attempt (July 2024)

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    Panel Calls for Secret Service Overhaul in Report on Trump Shooting Attempt

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    The findings of a review of the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump in July are stark but familiar, underscoring the challenge of overhauling the agency.An independent panel reviewing the failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July called on the Secret Service to replace its leadership with people from the private sector and focus almost exclusively on its protective mission.The recommendations, part of a report released on Thursday and commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, outlined deficiencies that had already been identified in the months after the rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. Those include the failure of the Secret Service to secure a nearby building where a would-be assassin stationed on the rooftop fired eight shots toward Mr. Trump. That and other security lapses, members of the panel said, resulted from an absence of “critical thinking” among agents and supervisors.The panel was particularly struck by a “lack of ownership” conveyed by the agents it interviewed. Those involved in the security planning did not take responsibility in the lead-up to the event, nor did they own failures in the aftermath. And, the report added, they “have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions or opportunities for improvement.”The findings are stark — this is the first assessment to bluntly identify failures on the part of senior agents on Mr. Trump’s personal detail. Yet the conclusions are also familiar.A panel convened in 2014 after a man scaled the White House fence and entered the mansion made similar proposals. That the issues persist a decade later underscores the challenge of overhauling an agency with such an entrenched culture.“The service has become insular and stale,” Janet Napolitano, a member of the four-person panel, said in an interview. Ms. Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service’s parent agency, from 2009 to 2013, added, “It is time for the service to kind of break out and to reach out beyond its own agency to bring in talent that can really take a fresh look at what it is they do, and how they do it.” In the past century, the agency has had only one director not promoted from within.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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      With Trump Facing Threats, Security and Politics Intersect as Never Before

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      He has been the target of two would-be assassins in a matter of months. The intelligence agencies have told him that Iran is still threatening to kill him, and Iranian hackers got into the email accounts of his aides.Those developments have left former President Donald J. Trump and his staff fearful, frustrated and dependent for the candidate’s safety on federal agencies at the heart of what Mr. Trump has long portrayed as a hostile “deep state.”But Mr. Trump and his team have also seized on his predicament for political ends, suggesting without evidence that the situation is at least partly the fault of the Biden-Harris administration for being unwilling to provide him the protection he needs to travel the country freely and meet voters on his terms.Mr. Trump approaches Election Day as simultaneously a subject of federal prosecution, a candidate who has threatened to fire much of the federal bureaucracy and a target dependent for information and protection on the same agencies likely to endure his retribution should he take office again.Interviews with people close to Mr. Trump and officials across the federal government reveal how deeply unnerved the Trump campaign has been by the assassination attempts and the Iranian threats and hacking — and how the American security apparatus has responded.At the same time, as Mr. Trump attacks and politicizes the agencies charged with both investigating the threats and protecting him, officials in the Biden White House and at the Secret Service worry that he is laying the groundwork to blame them should he lose the election.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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      Trump’s Return to Scene of Attack Is a Do-Over in More Ways Than One

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      Donald J. Trump returned to Butler, Pa., on Saturday for a massive rally at the fairgrounds where he was struck in July by a would-be assassin’s bullet, an event envisioned by his campaign as a show of strength and a memorial for the former volunteer fire chief who was killed during the attack. His speech quickly swung from a somber commemoration of the slain firefighter, Corey Comperatore, to a somewhat subdued, sanded-down version of his standard attacks on his opponent, complete with exaggerations and falsehoods. Mr. Trump commended his own performance in the face of adversity and brought out one of his biggest backers, the billionaire Elon Musk, who jumped up and down on the stage. For Mr. Trump, who has been jarred by the changes in the presidential race since he was attacked in Butler on July 13, the rally served another purpose: It offered him a chance to seek something of a do-over after a series of major events reshaped the contest just as the Republican convention in Milwaukee ended. The rally’s stagecraft and programming — with singers, family members and friends serving as “character witnesses” — echoed the convention’s grandiosity, down to the same opera singer who closed out the proceedings in Milwaukee performing a handful of songs.President Biden announced he was dropping his 2024 bid three days after Mr. Trump’s nominating convention, swamping all news coverage of the former president’s near-death experience and resetting the race with a new, younger Democratic opponent almost immediately. So in Butler on Saturday, Mr. Trump sought to recapture the same spirit that engulfed him in Milwaukee, where he was riding high in the polls as he was nominated for a third time just five days after the shooting. 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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      Widow of Man Killed in July Attack on Trump Returns for Rally

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      Helen Comperatore, the widow of Corey Comperatore, the former volunteer fire chief who was killed when a gunman tried to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pa., returned to the venue on Saturday when Mr. Trump came back for another rally.Mr. Comperatore, who was in the bleachers behind Mr. Trump in July, was killed as he tried to shield his wife and their two daughters when the shooter opened fire. Mr.s. Comperatore said that while it had not been an easy decision, she and her daughters had agreed that her late husband, who was a longtime Trump supporter, would have wanted them to return to the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds for Mr. Trump’s rally.“To go back up to that site where my husband was killed and open wounds that we’re trying to close — my kids haven’t even started to go back to work yet, and I was afraid it’d take them backwards,” she said in an interview this week. But ultimately, she said, “we decided this was something we needed to do.”“We needed to go and honor Corey,” she said. “He would have done it for me.”The stands in the rally venue held the coat of the former volunteer fire chief who was killed when a gunman opened fire at the July 13 rally, in Butler, Pa.Alex Brandon/Associated PressMrs. Comperatore said that a representative of Mr. Trump’s campaign had invited her to attend his event. A campaign spokeswoman said that Mr. Trump would “honor the victims from that tragic day and their families.”The Comperatores were sitting in the V.I.P. section at the rally at the Butler Farm Show complex, behind where Mr. Trump was standing, when the gunman, Thomas Crooks, opened fire. They had expected to watch the rally from the general seating area in front of the former president but had been ushered into the bleachers as rally staff filled in open seats shortly before the program began.“He was ecstatic,” Mrs. Comperatore said of her husband. It had been his first time seeing Mr. Trump speak in person.Mrs. Comperatore said she hoped to establish a foundation of some kind in her husband’s name. “It’s been very hard,” she said of the months since the shooting. “I don’t sleep very well at all — maybe an hour here, an hour there. I lost someone I’ve been with for 34 years. That’s more than half my life.” More

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      Trump Twists Harris’s Position on Fentanyl After She Called for a Border Crackdown

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      When Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border on Friday, she called fentanyl a “scourge on our country” and said that as president she would “make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”Ms. Harris pledged to give more resources to law enforcement officials on the front lines, including additional personnel and machines that can detect fentanyl in vehicles. And she said she would take aim at the “global fentanyl supply chain,” vowing to “double the resources for the Department of Justice to extradite and prosecute transnational criminal organizations and the cartels.”But that was not how her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, characterized her position on Sunday at a rally in Erie, Pa., where he made a false accusation against Ms. Harris that seemed intended to play on the fears and traumas of voters in communities that have been ravaged by fentanyl.“She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” Mr. Trump said during a speech that stretched for 109 minutes. It was the second straight day that Mr. Trump had amplified the same false claim about Ms. Harris; he did so on Saturday in Wisconsin.The former president did not offer context for his remarks, but his campaign pointed to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that Ms. Harris had filled out in 2019 during her unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.A question asking if Ms. Harris supported the decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use appeared to be checked “yes.” Ms. Harris wrote that it was “long past time that we changed our outdated and discriminatory criminalization of marijuana” and said that she favored treating drug addiction as a public health issue, focusing on rehabilitation instead of incarceration.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