The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee held a joint hearing Tuesday to examine the totality of the goat-rope that was security for former President Donald Trump at Butler, PA, on July 13, which led to him being wounded by a rifle bullet (see Sen. Kennedy Hilariously Destroys FBI Over Whether Trump Was Shot: ‘It Wasn’t a Murder Hornet?’) and coming within millimeters of death.
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The hearing did not shed a lot of light on the events of July 13. Everyone agreed that the Secret Service accepted responsibility but not so much as to do anything about it; see Ted Cruz Gets Into Shouting Match With Acting Secret Service Director Over Failure to Protect Trump and Josh Hawley Wrecks Acting Secret Service Director Over Agency’s Trump Assassination Attempt Posturing. The FBI tried to launch a narrative that Trump’s failed assassin, Thomas Crooks, was an anti-Semite and possibly racist while studiously avoiding extensive social media content that indicated he was a Joe Biden, mask-now, open-borders kind of Democrat; see Gab Social’s CEO Nails Deputy FBI Director for His Misleading Testimony to the Senate.
All in all, the picture painted was one of a Secret Service management structure that deprived the Trump campaign of requested resources for security because they could. The security coordination for the rally was slipshod and lackadaisical, with no apparent attempt to establish a unified command and operations structure for the different law enforcement agencies involved.
BACKGROUND:
Trump Assassination Attempt: Local SWAT Team Blames Lack of Planning, Communication – RedState
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Not everyone saw a petty, vindictive, blundering command structure in the Secret Service as the proximate cause of the killing of one rally participant and the wounding of two others and a presidential candidate.
Lindsey Graham used his opening statement to insist that someone needed to be fired.
Fair enough. But Graham devoted his first question to giving the acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe carte blanche to ask for more money.
GRAHAM: Thank you. Let’s go back to the resources. Do you need more money?
ROWE: Senator, we, listen, there isn’t a single branch, a single agency in the executive branch that could, that needs more money (note: this is inadvertently funny because it is right). Everyone would take more resources. We’ve had a great relationship with the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Management and Budget…
GRAHAM: Do you feel constrained to ask for more resources by anybody?
ROWE: No, sir, we don’t. And actually we have a great relationship with our appropriators and obviously the authorizing committees, and they have always looked out for the Secret Service.
GRAHAM: So I would encourage you to think big. When it comes to resourcing the department in a light of what happened here.
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The Secret Service currently has a budget in excess of $3 billion. Delaware’s budget is $4.5 billion.
Funding for the agency has increased over the last decade in part due to an incident in 2014, when a man scaled the White House fence and ran through its front doors. Although then-President Obama wasn’t in the building at the time, the incident caused a review of the Secret Service’s training and brought about calls for more funding.
Over the years, those demands have been answered, with lawmakers approving an additional $211 million in funding for the Secret Service in fiscal year 2023 alone, documents show.
Let’s review the bidding. The Secret Service has stonewalled the Senate and House in providing details on the assassination attempt. The Secret Service communications apparatus blatantly lied to Congress and the nation. Secret Service agents were diverted from Trump’s outdoor rally to beef up the protection for Dr. Jill, who was engaged in what can only be called counter-programming in a secure hotel in Pittsburg. The site security plan ignored a big f-ing building a mere 140 yards from the speaker’s dais. Counter-sniper teams were only made available the day before the rally and did not have time to produce a site plan. No one has been fired. The overwhelming odds are no one will be fired because most of these foul-ups were brought on by decisions made at Secret Service headquarters.
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The answer is not more money. As we’ve seen from history, more money begets more arrogance and more incompetence. The answer is a massive haircut that cleans out the headquarters and eliminates any task that is not a core function of the agency specified by federal statute. If the Secret Service doesn’t have adequate resources to protect presidential candidates, maybe their role should be reduced to providing a small command-and-control cell with the actual security provided by something like the successor to Blackwater Worldwide.
As Ronald Reagan said, “If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.” If you want more arrogance and incompetence in the federal government, then the surest way to get it is by rewarding abject failure with more money. If you want to reduce it, then hit the agency in the only place it cares about: its budget.