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Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri appeared on Fox News’ "Jesse Watters Primetime" and delivered some bombshell news: whistleblowers have told him that the Secret Service is “woefully unprepared” to protect candidates, and they’re taught by 2hr webinar on “Microsoft Teams”—and most of the law enforcement personnel at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally in July where Donald Trump narrowly escaped death from a sniper’s bullet weren’t even Secret Service. They were DHS officers: //

"The site agent, the lead agent, was known to the Trump campaign to be inexperienced, to be ineffectual, to be, frankly, incompetent at their job," Hawley previously said in an interview on "Jesse Watters Primetime." "I'm also told by whistleblowers that on that day, she was not enforcing the normal security protocols."

"She was not checking people's IDs. She did not use Secret Service agents," Hawley added. "Most of the agents there that day were not Secret Service agents. They were Homeland Security agents."

While Mr. Crooks’s motive remains opaque, his online searches reveal someone who was looking for an opportunity to pull off a spectacular attack that would garner widespread attention, by either inflicting mass casualties or killing someone famous. Thus far, that profile more closely resembles that of a mass shooter than a politically motivated assassin.

Starting as a teenager in 2019 through this year, Mr. Crooks progressed from searching “detonating cord,” “blasting cap” and “how to make a bomb from fertilizer” to seeking detailed information about the activities and whereabouts of politicians in both parties. By late 2023, his search history included queries related to Mr. Trump, President Biden and both parties’ conventions, the officials said. //

Gasoline Forever
38 minutes ago
It doesn’t really matter what his motive was. What matters is how bad the secret service performed. Either they should all be fired for incompetence or arrested for conspiracy

Five House Republicans — Reps. Andy Biggs and Eli Crane of Arizona, Matt Gaetz and Cory Mills of Florida, and Chip Roy of Texas — hosted a panel discussion about the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at the Heritage Foundation on Monday. //

But there were also some fiery moments with podcaster Dan Bongino, who used to be a Secret Service agent, as he lambasted the problems of the agency. He didn't hold back on how grave he thought this was, and he made three points. //

Then he answered some questions from the members of Congress, and he explained that things were now worse under Director Ronald Rowe than they were under former Director Kim Cheatle, who resigned in disgrace after the assassination attempt. //

Bongino warned that more would be coming, "[If] You think this is the last incident, you're out of your mind. We have seen these incidents over and over."

It may be months before we know the whole story behind the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. It may be years. We may never know. (Sadly, my money's on the latter.) There are times when the "public's right to know" just seems to slip through our fingers, and this may well be one of those times. We can hope not — but there are murmurings now of evidence tampering. That last is a big, serious assertion — but on Monday, a SWAT counter-sniper who was on the scene testified at a panel discussion held by five Republican members of Congress about an "odd pattern" of evidence handling. //

Washington Regional SWAT counter-sniper Ben Shaffer said it was “absolutely” concerning that the roof of the AGR International building had been quickly scrubbed and gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks’ body disposed of before an official autopsy report could be released. //

And another thing: Is it normally the role of the FBI to clean up crime scenes? Several companies in Pennsylvania specialize in hazardous materials removal and crime scene cleanup — are those kinds of contractors, not the usual people to clean up the aftermath of a scene like this?

There's more; the examination of Crooks' personal effects also raises some interesting questions. //

The encrypted communications seem like the biggest question. You can probably find directions on improvised explosives on the internet, if you know where to look, although I admit detonators would be a bit trickier. But encrypted communications platforms? Based in Belgium, Germany, and New Zealand? What platforms? What kind of platforms? What was sent and received by Crooks? Was he seeking information? Was he awaiting direction? If so, from whom? //

Mr. Fox
3 hours ago
I never considered myself a conspiracy theorist pre 2016...but after the fbi (and intel agencies en masse) lied to courts to spy on trump, leaked false stories to spin their spying as wrongdoing by trump, "investigated" russian collusion as a way to hide their wrongdoing and besmirch trump, trained and staged kidnapping plots on two democrat governors weeks before an election, planted fake bombs on jan 6, had plants in the crowd encouraging violence and lawlessness, raided trumps home leading to comical criminal indictments that the current president was actual guilty of....would any one be suprised if the fbi, cia, or ss trained this guy and let him get a shot off? Its a sad time in America.

I don't know a ton about Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), but I do know he has a background in law enforcement, so including him on the bipartisan task force investigating the J13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump seems like a sound decision. As one of 13 congressional members assigned to the task force, Higgins has been delving into the incident — had, in fact, already been investigating it personally prior to his appointment to the task force.

On August 12, Higgins filed a preliminary report to the task force Chairman Mike Kelly (R-PA), whose district encompasses the Butler County Fairgrounds (commonly referred to as "Butler Farm") where the incident occurred. The report was initially embargoed but on Thursday, was authorized for release. //

• The Secret Service (USSS) had never assigned a counter-sniper team to a former POTUS before J13. [What about presidential candidates/nominees?]

• Butler County tactical command had set aside radios for USSS to use for the event in the Emergency Services Unit (ESU) command post RV and reminded the USSS counter-sniper teams to pick them up, but they were never retrieved by USSS.

• The FBI cleaned up biological evidence from the crime scene, which, according to Higgins, "is unheard of. Cops don’t do that, ever."

• The FBI released Crooks’ body to his family for cremation on July 23. No one else knew about this until August 5.

Kylie Jane Kremer
@KylieJaneKremer
🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨

Matthew Crook’s body is GONE

@RepClayHiggins
requested to examine the assassin’s body and was told it was released to the family by the FBI.

Nobody even knew his body was gone until August 5, including the Butler County Coroner, LEO, and the Butler County Sheriff.

Crooks was cremated on July 23, just 10 days after the assassination attempt.

All roads keep leading back to alphabet agencies being involved and/or covering up what actually happened in Butler, PA when President Trump was shot.
8:13 PM · Aug 15, 2024

• “[T]his action by the FBI can only be described by any reasonable man as an obstruction to any following investigative effort.” //

The key takeaway from this, in my view, is that the USSS didn't avail themselves of available radios, which would have allowed them to be in direct communication with the local law enforcement personnel with whom they were supposed to be coordinating and, more importantly, the FBI moved very quickly to clear the personnel, clear the crime scene, and clear the shooter's body, even while knowing that there were ongoing investigations and would be follow-on investigations. Why were they in such a hurry? How are we supposed to feel reassured that they are conducting and will conduct a thorough, honest investigation?

Secure Technology Value Solutions is a company with a boring name and a bland website that is staffed by jovial-looking former policemen and corrections officers. It doesn’t exactly scream “Chinese Communist Party threat,” and that’s precisely the point.

Secure Technology Value Solutions is actually a front for Nuctech, a Chinese government- and military-owned company, and it’s selling sensitive security equipment to police and corrections departments all across the United States.

Nuctech sells devices such as the body scanners that passengers must use during airport security checks, as well as larger devices, such as cargo scanners for commercial ports.

It was an early adopter of a technique that’s become popular among Chinese companies that fall under national security scrutiny: Change the name of your American subsidiary to something that sounds benign and hope to fly under the radar.

Nuctech’s U.S. subsidiary changed its name to Secure Technology Value Solutions in 2022, after Nuctech was hit by several forms of national security sanctions.

Nuctech equipment was blocked from U.S. airports a decade ago by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and sanctioned by the U.S. Commerce Department in 2020 on national security grounds.

Shortly after Fox News Digital released bodycam video from Butler Township Police Department officers who were on the scene when Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal posted audio also obtained from Butler PD bodycams revealing their frustration at the Secret Service for not securing the rooftop at AGR. //

GreenLanternMD etba_ss
3 hours ago edited
Does anyone but me think it was odd that the Secret Service never sent a counter sniper team to a Trump rally before this one? I’m thinking that was not so much lucky as it was to make sure the shooter died after killing Trump, just as Jack Ruby suddenly was able to kill Oswald. Dead men tell no tales about the CIA.

In July of 2023, a uniformed Secret Service agent found a bag of cocaine in the White House. Now we don't, to this day, know who the cocaine belonged to - we may very well speculate, for instance, about a certain member of the Biden family known to have substance abuse problems, but there has been no release of evidence as to whom the drug belonged to or how it came to be in the White House.

Now we learn that the former Director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned in disgrace following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, conspired to eliminate any evidence that the White House cocaine existed at all. //

It's unfortunate that Kimberly Cheatle only has one resignment in disgrace to give for her country. It's difficult, if not impossible, to see this as anything short of a partisan effort on the part of senior Secret Service officials to conceal evidence of a crime. If this is the case, it's an unforgivable act and one that should result in criminal penalties. //

anon-7iuo
10 hours ago
While Cheatle only had but one resignation to give, Rowe and the other three rotten USSS leaders, as per the USSSwhistleblower, are still eligible to give theirs.

Rep. August Pfluger
@RepPfluger
·
Follow
Our country was millimeters away from a presidential assassination.

My bill ensures all presidential candidates are protected and requires the Secret Service Director to be confirmed by the Senate.

USSS Directors MUST be capable and apolitical.
12:59 PM · Aug 5, 2024 //

Robbie Mouton
@mcgmouton57
·
Follow
Senators Chuck Grassley(R-IA) and Catherine Cortez Masto(D-Nev.) have introduced the 'Protect Act' that would require Senate confirmation for all future USSS Directors. This would remove it from being a presidential appointment and bring it line with other federal law enforcement… Show more
12:00 PM · Jul 27, 2024

ConservativeInMinnesota GBenton
6 hours ago
The Biden administration wasted trillions of dollars on puffery like DEI, pronouns and the green new deal. The result was the worst inflation in US history using historic metrics.

You're telling me that the one area the Biden administration didn't want to spend money was Trump's Secret Service protection? Yeah, I can believe that. //

Clare Boothe Lucid
7 hours ago
Consider this: If Trump had not run this time, the SS would have needed to protect some Republican nominee as well as protecting Trump as a former president, so the SS would have needed two security details. They should gave been able to afford to provide both those SS details to Trump. //

TexasVeteran
7 hours ago edited

"We're not going to burn through our budget — all the extra overtime, all the extra travel, all these extra agents and resources — so that Trump can have all of these rallies every week,'"

I don’t see a problem here. Think of all the money they must be saving with both Biden and Harris hiding in the White House basement!😂

Conservative War Machine
@WarMachineRR
·
Follow
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. says the Butler rally was the FIRST time counter-snipers were deployed to President Trump’s detail.

2:27 PM · Aug 2, 2024 //

Perhaps most alarmingly, Rowe admitted that an officer on the ground did send a message indicating a person with a weapon had been spotted - but that the Secret Service did not receive it:

Josh Hawley @HawleyMO
·
🚨🚨 NEW - Whistleblower tells me Secret Service Acting Director Rowe personally directed cuts to the USSS agents who do threat assessments for events. Whistleblower says those agents were NOT present in Butler - and some of them had warned of security problems for months
3:33 PM · Aug 1, 2024 //

According to Hawley's letter, the normal evaluation by the Secret Service Counter Surveillance Division (CSD), the division that performs threat assessment of event sites before the event occurs, was not done. 

The whistleblower claims that if personnel from CSD had been present at the rally, the gunman would have been handcuffed in the parking lot after being spotted with a rangefinder.

The whistleblower also said it was Rowe who was responsible for cuts to the CSD, reducing the manpower by twenty percent, and he didn't disclose that during his congressional testimony. 

The whistleblower explained there were continuing security concerns about how they were dealing with Trump coverage and that people who spoke up about it faced retaliation.  //

You can see from this angle just how exposed Trump (and Copenhaver) were and you can see a person moving on the roof with a direct line to them. This is what the Secret Service coverage (or lack thereof) allowed.

In the video taken at 6:08 p.m. on July 13, the person appears on the roof of the building adjacent to where Trump is speaking and can be seen walking from the 1:00 second mark to about the 2:50 second mark.

Thomas Crooks allegedly then fired three minutes later, at 6:11.

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.

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; //

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. //

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:
[Video]

Fair enough. But Graham devoted his first question to giving the acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe carte blanche to ask for more money. //

The Secret Service currently has a budget in excess of $3 billion. Delaware's budget is $4.5 billion. //

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 Pittsburgh. 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.

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."

The social media account Abbate referred to in his opening testimony predates the Gab posts and comments, so they emphasized something Crooks wrote when he was younger than 15 and ignored what he wrote when he was older.

None of this means that Abbate lied; it just means that he gave calculated, incomplete information to the country via his public testimony. He knew that "anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature" would be like catnip to the media and set the basis for a narrative that Donald Trump's rhetoric motivated the shooter to act with the implication that this was karma. This is not a man or a law enforcement agency that we can trust.

A Secret Service counter-sniper warned in an email there would be another assassination attempt, citing the agency’s inability to protect leaders after a shooter wounded former President Donald Trump, two of his supporters, and killed another at a rally.

“We all SHOULD expect another [assassination] attempt to happen before November,” the counter-sniper wrote in the email obtained by RealClearPolitics and posted to X. “This agency NEEDS to change, if not now, WHEN? The NEXT assassination attempt in 30 days?”

The counter-sniper emailed the entire Secret Service Uniformed Division Monday night, saying the operators assigned to Trump’s fatal rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 did their jobs “with their hands tied” and that Secret Service supervisors “knew better.”

RedDog_FLA
7 hours ago
The man in the arena is returning to the arena - honorably.

Chris A
6 hours ago
“What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”

They're getting you to focus on the wrong things.
Misdirection has always been the name of the Deep State's game.

The catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. It’s complex, deeply interconnected, and filled with single points of failure. As we experienced last week, a single problem in a small piece of software can take large swaths of the internet and global economy offline.

The brittleness of modern society isn’t confined to tech. We can see it in many parts of our infrastructure, from food to electricity, from finance to transportation. This is often a result of globalization and consolidation, but not always. In information technology, brittleness also results from the fact that hundreds of companies, none of which you;ve heard of, each perform a small but essential role in keeping the internet running. CrowdStrike is one of those companies.

This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing—as opposed to personal computing—a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.

But brittleness is profitable only when everything is working. When a brittle system fails, it fails badly. The cost of failure to a company like CrowdStrike is a fraction of the cost to the global economy. And there will be a next CrowdStrike, and one after that. The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes. //

Imagine a house where the drywall, flooring, fireplace, and light fixtures are all made by companies that need continuous access and whose failures would cause the house to collapse. You’d never set foot in such a structure, yet that’s how software systems are built. It’s not that 100 percent of the system relies on each company all the time, but 100 percent of the system can fail if any one of them fails. But doing better is expensive and doesn’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line. //

This is not something we can dismantle overnight. We have built a society based on complex technology that we’re utterly dependent on, with no reliable way to manage that technology. Compare the internet with ecological systems. Both are complex, but ecological systems have deep complexity rather than just surface complexity. In ecological systems, there are fewer single points of failure: If any one thing fails in a healthy natural ecosystem, there are other things that will take over. That gives them a resilience that our tech systems lack.

We need deep complexity in our technological systems, and that will require changes in the market. Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That;s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.

How do we accomplish this? There are examples in the technology world, but they are piecemeal. Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.

Last week’s update wouldn’t have been a major failure if CrowdStrike had rolled out this change incrementally: first 1 percent of their users, then 10 percent, then everyone. But that’s much more expensive, because it requires a commitment of engineer time for monitoring, debugging, and iterating. And can take months to do correctly for complex and mission-critical software. An executive today will look at the market incentives and correctly conclude that it’s better for them to take the chance than to “waste” the time and money.

A new whistleblower is revealing another agency failure by the Secret Service two weeks after former President Donald Trump was shot. //

On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., posted a letter on X addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas outlining the new allegations brough forward from an anonymous whistleblower.

“According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally,” Hawley wrote. “This means that the technology was both available to [U.S. Secret Service] and able to be deployed to secure the site.”

The Secret Service, however, “said no,” and the whistleblower “further alleges that after the shooting took place, [U.S. Secret Service] changed course and asked the local partner to deploy the drone technology to surveil the site in the aftermath of the attack.”