40
votes
US Secret Service director quits after Donald Trump shooting
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- Title
- US latest news: Kamala Harris skips Benjamin Netanyahu Congress address
- Authors
- Iona Cleave
- Published
- Jul 23 2024
- Word count
- 87 words
This, to me, is an excellent example of how far the US has fallen. Nothing gets resolved by this person resigning, the exact same teams still exist in the Secret Service, none of the deficiencies that led to the attempt are resolved, the local police who lapsed in their jobs are not held accountable, and we lose a ton of institutional knowledge and expertise…but a handful of people will feel better.
America maintains a facade of the highest degree but it is crumbling.
The kneejerk reaction to fire her was really surprising, especially from the Democrats. The investigations didn't even finish yet. We have no idea what caused the lapse, or if there even was a lapse to begin with.
Being a presidential candidate carries the risk of being attacked no matter what. The secret service's job is to reduce that risk as much as possible, but ultimately the risk belongs to the candidate themselves. If the only consideration to take into account was Trump's safety, they would just lock him in an armored box and he'd be perfectly safe. That's not what Trump, or any candidate wants though. They want to be seen out and about, interacting with the public, as someone they can relate to, which is directly at odds with security considerations.
Having overwatch, secure areas, reconnaissance of the site, etc will reduce the risk, but it can never eliminate it. The fact is that when you're in an open area, you're vulnerable to being shot from up to a mile or more away. You just cannot guarantee a person's total safety in a situation like that.
Now I don't know why the shooter was able to get so close to trump with a rifle, but neither do the Congressmen that called for Cheatles head, and neither does Cheatle herself.
The investigation isn't complete. It could be that the agents were not following established procedure, it could be that the procedure was wrong, it could be that the measures that would allow the former president to be more secure were denied by Trump's team, or were prohibitively expensive, or literally hundreds of other reasons why what happened happened. It could be that literally every decision that was made was correct with the data available, and they just got unlucky this time.
The point is that we don't know. I hate the reactionary "heads will roll" approach, because it's just an emotional, useless approach that solves nothing. I feel bad for Cheatle, because there's a good chance she did nothing wrong. Protection of VIPs isn't even the secret service's main mission, so I wouldn't be surprised if she wasn't personally involved in this operation at all.
I also really dislike congress framing this as a "total failure".
Trump is alive. After the shot, it seems like they quickly did as they were trained to do, protected Trump, and neutralized the shooter within seconds. Yes, trump was injured and an innocent person was killed, but you had a shooter with a semi automatic rifle firing into a massive crowd of people. It could have been far, far worse.
I'm not sure I agree with everything you're saying but don't know quite enough to comment, however it certainly was a total failure.
Trump is alive due to EXTREME luck. You can literally see the piece of his ear missing from the various initial photos. From the point of a security detail you cannot ever allow a shooter to fire an unobstructed shot off, especially from that close, because odds are they will kill whoever they're shooting at. The fact they got him out of there, after he'd taken his two shots and already been killed, is not some major success. It's literally not supposed to happen because odds are by that time you're cleaning up a body off the ground, not rescuing the president.
I agree. The shooter was:
Plus:
Trump is alive due to extreme luck, but also because of quick reacting, well trained counter snipers that were put into positions with good vantage points to possible shooting positions, and good communications to target the shooter.
If the secret service had not been there, there's virtually no way Trump would have survived.
There's no world where every possible firing position is locked down at all times wherever a president goes. It's just not possible.
That's why the investigation is needed to determine did the operation do a reasonable job securing the venue, or was there negligence somewhere. Just because he was shot doesn't mean that someone didn't do their job correctly. It's possible, and maybe even likely that they didn't, but if that's the case, Cheatle shouldn't be the only one fired.
"Just because someone got away with top secret information, doesn't mean someone didn't do their job correctly" is not how these things work. It 100% means someone didn't do their job correctly, because their job was to anticipate any potential problems, and design procedures to prevent that.
This isn't some spy thriller assassination attempt that no one could have predicted, or 1 mile+ long range sniper shot. This is literally the bare minimum of what they are supposed to be preventing. A civilian with a rifle on a low roof, 400 ft away, in plain sight, who was reported multiple times, and had people watch him climb up.
And yes I doubt this stops with Cheatle, but it absolutely starts with her. Again this isn't some "nobody saw it coming" kind of political sacrifice/gesture thing.
Further I would not be shocked if the fact the investigation has taken this long means the facts are extremely damming. It is likely that if they had solid evidence that local PD fucked up or something extraordinary happened they would've already divulged that. Politics is very much a game to some extent and there's no way politicians, especially the morally bankrupt morons we've got now, would keep quiet.
Literally all of this is supposed to be preventative not reactive. The fact the gunman got MULTIPLE shots off is an utter failure at a very high level. Sure the actual people doing the shooting after the fact were on point, but the entire idea is they shouldn't need to be because it's not possible to climb on a roof, whip out a rifle, take a firing position, and squeeze accurate shots off quickly.
There is 0 reason that roof shouldn't have been watched like a hawk, and the details that are already dribbling out don't give any credence to the idea that this was some brilliant plan.
Who saw him? Reported to who? Who watched them climb up? What was the view of the roof? How many other similar roofs were in the area? What's the procedure when someone like that is reported? Who created that procedure? Based on what? If the procedure wasn't followed, why was that procedure not followed? What's the normal amount of involvement in planning an operation at the director level? Who planned the operation? Why were they chosen to plan the operation? How many agents were on site? How many is standard? Who set that standard?
These are all questions that the people who demanded her resignation don't have answers to, because investigations are needed to answer them. They also are some of the questions that would determine whether she was negligent or not.
These operations are never going to make the people they're protecting perfectly safe. That's the goal, but realistically, there's a set budget, a set timeframe, and a set of political objectives the candidate wants to achieve that the people protecting them has to work within. The best they can do is reduce risk as much as possible, with the information they have at the time given those constraints.
I get that this is all a moot point and she was asked to resign as a political move to expediently have a scapegoat and make it appear as if everyone is united on this, but it's not at all fair to Cheatle, and in a more reasonable climate, we'd wait until the facts are in before relieving someone with that much institutional knowledge, who by all accounts seemed like a competent, seasoned agent and director.
Some of those questions do seem to have reports coming out with potential answers already, though from our vantage point it's hard to verify their accuracy if its going from one anonymous source to a news reporter etc.
In any case, I still agree with you overall that more answers need to be known before coming to any real conclusions. Also funding is a part of this too. There's a reason candidates don't even get protection until a certain point, and Trump may have only had protection at that point because he was a former president.
If Trump wasn't a former President, it's very possible he wouldn't have even had a secret service detail (it would have been just under 120 days, so technically possible but not sure if they are strictly providing that right at 120 days before someone even has the official nomination).
This goes into some of the questions you mentioned that need answers before providing clarity, what level of protection do former presidents typically have or need? Most former presidents don't likely need as much protection as current presidents because a former president is less relevant in terms of impact to the country at that point (though still far more relevant than any random individual which is why they still get some protection). So it happens that it was a relatively uncommon circumstance where a former president was in a position of greater relevance than typical for former presidents because he lost an election and is still eligible for another term and can run again this election, and doesn't have the protections that a sitting president would typically have when running for a second term.
As far as I can even find, the last time a former president ran for election (meaning someone who lost their second term re-election while sitting as president and then ran later) was Herbert Hoover, in 1936 and 1940, and Hoover wasn't even close to winning nominations in his party in those cases so he was hardly even relevant.
So basically for more than 100 years, former presidents have never really had a reason to have much protection. In fact, it was more than 100 years ago when Theodore Roosevelt had been in a similar situation, a former President running for President in 1912 and also had an assassination attempt against him. It's possible there are many more attempts stopped before they ever really got anywhere that aren't publicized, but this page lists very few attempts on the lives of former presidents, especially relative to sitting presidents.
That isn't to say the Secret Service shouldn't have the awareness to recognize the most recent former president who is running for another term shouldn't have some elevated protections, but it's such a rare circumstance that I think people should consider that when evaluating what to expect from a secret service detail on a former president.
I'd also say the supposed billionaire Presidential candidate should have some responsibility for their own security detail. If as mentioned above, not for being a former President and if he did not have secret service protection at that point, what would he do then? Look at 2016, this presumably was before he had secret service protection as far as I can tell there's no mention of it anywhere on that page and seemingly it was more than 120 days before the general election and he wasn't a former president at that point. So he was able to have security in those rallies without the Secret Service, why should his protection detail be solely up to the Secret Service and government funding? He should be augmenting the security the Secret Service provides.
That’s not how that works. The investigation is taking that long because proper investigations take that long. You don’t just release the info you know the soonest, you do a comprehensive audit of the entire protection plan and who was responsible for what parts. Politicians are not the target audience of these investigations, that’s why they get summaries. They need to be in the know but that’s it. These reports are for people like the director to determine where the gaps were so they can be fixed for next time.
Our government is a dog and pony show and it’s getting a bit tiring.
I disagree. If Dems were at all soft on the response to the shooting, then it would reinforce the conservative narrative that "Dems don't care if Trump is killed and may even want it to happen."
To be fair you can't counter conservative narratives because they do it regardless of the reality of the situation. There was a sitting congressman (Mike Collins) who called it a hit from Biden on the day of the shooting.
"Do" || "Don't ∴ "Damned"
I found this article interesting and related to what you are getting at here.
https://the.ink/p/you-should-say-true-things
I'm having a hard time summarizing it, but the basic gist is that Democrats treating things as "normal" when Republicans don't actually confirms the Republican narrative and allows them to control the discussions from the get go. It continually keeps Democrats on their back foot, always trying to play the Republican game, which is hard to do since Republicans don't play "fairly" in the first place.
I think the only total game over screen fail state the Secret Service has, is when the (ex)president is assassinated. And it was damned close to happening.
She needs to go. If not for the failure of securing the venue, then the total lack of accountability she's presenting.
The only answers I heard her give were basically "I can't tell you the answer to that until the investigation concludes", which is true. Any questions she answers now would just be speculation, and could impede an ongoing investigation.
Also, if its your opinion that any head of the secret service should automatically be fired if the president comes close to being assassinated, it may be worth noting that James Rowley, the head of the secret service when JFK was assassinated was not fired and didn't resign. He had a long successful career, serving under two more presidents after that (successful , obviously) assassination.
The JFK assassination is not analogous at all.
It was in a massively crowded area, while the president was on a moving vehicle with an open roof, following a 10 mile route (although to be fair the shooter did actually get closer than this shooter did, by about 200-300 feet).
It's not hard to look at that situation and say that things might have been hard to secure, and in fact literally every policy and procedure for presidents moving forward changed because of this event and the eventual feeling that similar such events in the future would be just as impossible to secure.
The trump shooter was reported multiple times and was in a mostly empty rural area. Basic/Private security firms could've handled this, let alone the secret service.
Maybe, maybe not. There's no actual investigation to base any of this on. That's the whole point of having an investigation, to answer these questions.
If Cheatle was negligent, she should have been fired. If not, she shouldn't have. They just demanded her resignation on the basis that the president was shot, literally no other facts, because the investigations haven't concluded to provide them.
My boss has a viewpoint which seems instructive in this situation: credit flows downward, blame flows upward. While we can’t have expected Ms. Cheatle to have completely fixed everything wrong with the agency, progress should’ve been evident in getting the agency back on track. The assassination attempt demonstrates that the agency is not in such a place. Ultimately, she is responsible for the agency, it’s successes, and failures.
By that point of view, Biden should resign too. The secret service is an executive branch agency. I don't think that should be such a cut and dry rule.
I appreciated what you said here, and I would like to read more of what you have to say on topic, if anything.
Can you elaborate on which topic and what you appreciated? I think, in general, I’m finding that whatever we’ve done for the last few years as a society has led to us becoming less thoughtful. The facade is everywhere and, once you see the cracks, it’s hard not to notice it everywhere.
I don’t believe the secret service missing text messages from the Jan 6 insurrection has been resolved. To me, that’s a scandal of similar importance because it’s a coverup.
I think your title doesn't match the link. When opened I'm seeing: "Kamala Harris more popular than Donald Trump, new poll shows"
I think it was referencing an entry in the 'live reporting' section at the bottom of the linked article, which is why the linked article itself doesn't match the title. And AFAICT, Telegraph doesn't have any way to directly link to a specific live reporting entry. If people CTRL-F for "Secret Service director resigns" they could find it though:
But there is now a full article on the same subject that was released an hour later:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/07/23/us-secret-service-director-resigns-over-trump-shooting/
So I have changed the link to that.