413 private links
Josh Hawley @HawleyMO
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🚨🚨 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.”
The Secret Service reportedly didn't have drones of their own flying over the site -- the only drone reported so far was from the shooter, Thomas Crooks. As we previously reported, the Trump detail had had requests for more resources turned down, and there were reports that resources were delegated to Jill Biden's dinner instead of the much larger rally, as well as that Jill Biden had 12 post-standers as opposed to Trump being given three. That was insane given the potential threats against Trump and the size of the rally.
Catherine Herridge @C__Herridge
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NEW:
“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.”
Via @HawleyMO
2:37 PM · Jul 25, 2024
The Secret Service is ‘encouraging’ the Trump campaign to halt the large-scale events his supporters have grown accustomed to. //
The Secret Service did not return an email from The Federalist requesting comment. So it’s not clear whether the agency has made the same requests of Vice President Kamala Harris, ... //
Sean Davis @seanmdav
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This is a direct threat from the regime to Trump: if he doesn’t stop trying to win, they’ll make sure the next attacker doesn’t miss. We all know what they’re doing.
Image
8:40 PM · Jul 23, 2024 //
The Post devoted several column inches to what a burden Trump’s outdoor rallies have been for an agency that glaringly failed its mission to protect him. The Post’s narrative is anything but subtle: Trump — and his penchant for massive campaign rallies — is to blame for his near-assassination.
“The rallies have long been viewed as onerous by the Secret Service because they include complicated outdoor venues with thousands — if not tens of thousands — of people,” the Post’s Josh Dawsey writes. “Most other former presidents rarely appear in public, and when they do, they usually appear in settings such as conferences and restaurants with fewer people. Trump requires a much larger security footprint than other past presidents because he holds so many large events.”
But Trump isn’t merely a former president showing up to a haughty cocktail party with D.C. elites. He’s the GOP’s candidate for president, whether the Post and their Democrat pals like it or not.
Was the assassination attempt a failure because Trump survived? Or was it a failure because he was shot in the first place? //
The FBI and the Department of Justice failed to take Trump down through the Russia hoax. Then the intelligence state failed to bring Trump down through impeachment with a hoax on aid to Ukraine. Then congressional Democrats failed to keep Trump down with another hoax surrounding the capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. As the DOJ’s lawfare campaign to imprison Trump with a series of charges brought by prosecutors of the incumbent regime began to derail this summer, the Secret Service naturally became the agency of last resort through which Trump’s opponents could finally execute their “insurance policy” against another Trump presidency.
Trump’s shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, might not have deliberately coordinated with deep state security to pull the trigger on the Republican presidential nominee. But the string of security lapses in the former president’s detail clearly left the door open for any number of the crazies who wish to carry out an assassination, including even a deranged 20-year-old, to succeed just once.
On Wednesday, the FBI confirmed Crooks had been able to fly a reconnaissance drone just roughly 200 yards from the rally fairgrounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, only hours before the event. The news had already been leaked to The Wall Street Journal, which reported a programmed flight path “suggests Crooks flew the drone more than once as he researched and scoped out the event site.”
Several law enforcement officials were apparently stationed inside the building from which Crooks was able to fire off eight gunshots in under six seconds, injuring two rallygoers and killing one. According to the disgraced ex-Secret Service director, however, the rooftop from which the gunman fired was left vacant because it was “sloped.” A former roofer explained in a column for The Federalist why Cheatle’s “‘Sloped’ Roof Excuse Is Total Nonsense.” //
The courageous commitment of front-line agents to take a bullet for the former president was on clear display at this month’s rally, but the leadership within the upper echelons of the federal security agency obviously carries no such mandate. The Secret Service director who finally stepped down was also an appointee of First Lady Jill Biden’s, whose own detail was apparently beefed up while Trump’s team was stripped down. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) denied the Trump campaign’s requests for additional security “time and again,” and yet Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas still hasn’t joined Cheatle in resigning.
On Tuesday, the Secret Service requested Trump forgo any more outdoor campaign rallies right after Republicans wrapped up one of the most successful conventions to propel the party into the fall election. //
Even if Trump’s assassination attempt wasn’t a government plot to kill an ex-president, it’s obvious to Americans that the Secret Service was yet another hostile agency prone to the corrupt impulses of far-left ideologues in the capital who grandstand on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. If the Secret Service had been weaponized to block Trump’s triumphant return to the Oval Office, the events might look very similar to those of the last two weeks.
Of all the recent trends in automotive technology and design, the adoption of capacitive controls over mechanical switches and buttons—particularly on multifunction steering wheels—is among the most deplorable. One can see the appeal to the designer—slick-looking fiat panels trump dust-attracting seams, for starters. The bean counters love them, too—it takes less time to install the subassemblies, and that means a little more profit per car. It's just that they suck. And now, some Volkswagen drivers say capacitive buttons are to blame for their car crashes.
In the video, which runs one minute and twenty-five seconds, a witness in the crowd named Jon Malis was somehow able to keep his wits about him and keep filming even as he realized there was a shooter perched on a rooftop. Eight shots ring out from the attempted assassin, then two more from law enforcement, including the shot that took him out. That kill shot was reportedly fired by a Secret Service sniper. //
The cellphone cameraman, Malis, explained what he saw:
Definitely wasn't secure. I'm actually ex-military. One of the first things I noticed when we walked up, I'm like, we... None of us have been vetted. We're all along the fence. We all have a view of the stage. We could see Trump.
On Tuesday afternoon, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) shared bodycam footage taken shortly after the incident on his Twitter/X account. Grassley has marked the footage (appropriately) as "Sensitive Content," so I'm including the link to his tweet, along with an embed of the video (below) shared by other accounts on the platform.
In his tweet, Grassley stated:
SENSITIVE CONTENT: July 13 Bodycam footage provides more info than Secret Service will share w America We NEED detailed answers ASAP on security failures TRANSPARENCY BRINGS ACCOUNTABILITYVid obtained from Beaver Co Emergency Services Unit in compliance w congressional requests
Madam Director, I would fire you — regardless of the failure — I would fire you just how you've handled it since. You should have been the first to the mics, to say, "America, world, I want to assure you we're going to get to the bottom of this. I want to assure you full transparency. Our agency clearly had major gaps here. And I want to personally take responsibility and accountability. You should have been the first, standing alongside Secretary Mayorkas. And I would even go so far as to say have daily press conferences, updating everyone on what we know. But you haven't had any of that. What are you hiding behind? Because you're making the situation worse. I think you've heard that on a bipartisan basis here: You are making this situation far worse in the absence of information. //
Fishin'withFredo
2 hours ago
Just come out with it, for god's sake. This was a multi-agency orchestrated plan to kill Donald Trump. //
wildmlm Fishin'withFredo
12 minutes ago
No. Because those secrets would never stay secret. Listen to her…she’s incompetent. They were lax and overconfident. //
Spike the Kool-Aid P Bro
2 hours ago
There is no accountability because the true power does not lie with We The People or our elected representatives, where it is supposed to. The hubris of those who rule (not govern) us is yet again on full display.
America's true and only systemic RACE problem is the federal government, which takes zero Responsibility, has no Accountability, never faces Consequences, and does not apply Equal treatment under the law.
That needs to change. The federal government and those who control it do not have our consent to rule over us.
Rep. Eli Crane
@RepEliCrane
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This video was taken from one of the windows the Secret Service had access to, overlooking the entire roof.
As you can see, they had complete coverage.
Makes you wonder how on earth they allowed the shooter to access the roof, let alone crawl up it & fire several shots.
2:27 PM · Jul 22, 2024 //
With questions still swirling about why warnings to local police about the suspect were slow to reach Secret Service personnel, Homeland Security Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) said he learned Monday that local authorities were excluded from the Secret Service command posts for the July 13 rally, even though such officials had been granted that access at similar events in the past.
“Normally, the local law enforcement guys are allowed to sit in the Secret Service … control room,” Green said. “Today, the locals shared with us that they were not allowed to have anybody in there. So, that makes you want to dig a little further, right?”
After claiming to have ramped up security around former President Donald Trump because of an Iranian plot to assassinate him, the Secret Service provided only three agency personnel for “post-standing” Trump’s fateful July 13 Pennsylvania rally, compared to the 12 post-standers that first lady Jill Biden received at a dinner in nearby Pittsburgh that night, according to emails between and among Secret Service personnel obtained by RealClearPolitics.
The Secret Service typically assigns special agents in a candidate’s detail, or “shift” agents in Secret Service lingo, to posts within an inner perimeter of an event. The middle perimeter is then monitored by agents pulled for local Secret Service field offices and assigned as “post-standers” assigned to specific spots and responsible for security specific targeted areas. //
Probable Cause
31 minutes ago
To be fair, it does make sense that they'd assign more resources to protect the current president. /s. //
Chuck in TX
27 minutes ago
Now, let's dig a little deeper and see if it gets even more interesting. Three were assigned to the Butler, PA detail. Was this a one time, singular, reduction? Was this abnormally low compared to the weeks and months prior? In other words, did the Secret Service reduce protection specifically for this event? An event where they secured the building the shooter used but allowed him to access the roof? An event where multiple law enforcement and bystanders reported a man with a rifle in a shooting position and they chose to look the other way? //
Truth Seeker First
22 minutes ago
Now all needs to be done to make a head count of attendees at fake-doctor Jill's event and Trump's event to get a "post" to attendees ratio to evaluate that there is no political bias in assigning Aecret Servuce Agents.
I can tell you already, that Jill's 6 attendees event got already more agents assigned than Trump's 30,000 attendees!
Wow, politicising needed personal protection for opposition party's candidates!
Rep. Mike Waltz
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23h
@michaelgwaltz
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Once again Mayorkas has MISLED the public.
On CNN he called my statement that President Trump’s detail was DENIED repeated requests for stronger secret service protection “an irresponsible statement that is unequivocally false”.
Now WaPo is citing officials that I was CORRECT,…
Josh Dawsey
@jdawsey1
NEWS: Secret Service repeatedly denied requests from Trump’s detail, contrary to their statement last week. Requests included at times: snipers, magnetometers and agents to work them, specialty teams. Our latest: https://washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/07/20/trump-secret-service-security-attempted-assassination/
Rep. Mike Waltz
@michaelgwaltz
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Next time you’re going to call me and your own Secret Service agents liars on national TV, make sure that you're not the one lying to the American people yourself.
7:39 PM · Jul 20, 2024
Rep. Mike Waltz
@michaelgwaltz
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I have very reliable sources telling me there have been repeated requests for stronger secret service protection for President Trump.
Denied by Secretary Mayorkas.
Chad Pergram
@ChadPergram
Comer wants USSS Director Cheadle to appear for a hearing on Trump shooting “soon.” His committee has oversight of Secret Service:
Comer: My prayers are with President Trump and the victims of the assassination attempt at today’s rally in Pennsylvania. I thank the brave Secret…
9:59 PM · Jul 13, 2024
Rep. Mike Waltz
@michaelgwaltz
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Director Cheadle should be fired just for how badly she’s dealt with the public this week.
NO press conferences, NO on-camera briefings, NO flow of information to the American people.
The public has a RIGHT TO KNOW how someone came within 1/4 inch of killing President Trump!
5:00 PM · Jul 20, 2024
Insiders told The Post that local law enforcement was recruited for the Butler, Pennsylvania rally because Secret Service headquarters denied the ex-president’s request for extra resources.
Trump’s personal detail asks Secret Service headquarters for resources –manpower, equipment, tech — headquarters approves or denies at their discretion.
Only when denied would the detail inquire with the field office, which would backfill with any available resources, including local law enforcement.
A gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump was able to fly a drone and get aerial footage of the western Pennsylvania fairgrounds shortly before the former president was set to speak there, law-enforcement officials briefed on the matter said, further underscoring the stunning security lapses ahead of Trump’s near assassination.
Thomas Matthew Crooks flew the drone on a programmed flight path earlier in the day on July 13 to scour the Butler Farm Show grounds ahead of Trump’s ill-fated rally, the officials said. The predetermined path, the officials added, suggests Crooks flew the drone more than once as he researched and scoped out the event site. [....]