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Secret Service Didn't Give Trump Extra Security Because It Didn't Want to Spend the Money – RedState
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
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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
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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."
Just Jim
2 hours ago
I'm tired of hearing "black community." I'm tired of hearing, "What are you going to do for the black community?"
This is a separate-but-equal mentality and until it ends, we will always have to pretend we have racial issues. And that's what it is; a pretense. It's a facade erected by people that want power.
There are very few issues facing black people that aren't faced by people of every other race. The few issues that are supposedly different are either some very specific health issues or issues that have been imposed by decades of failed Democrat policies.
Trump is correct. Solve issues for all Americans and you solve issues for the "black community."
Instead of asking Trump to give reasons why Black voters should vote for him, Scott turned into the "LANGUAGE POLICE," and couched the narrative that it is what Trump says, and not what he does, that is why "Black people" do not like him. Trump rightly called her out on the rude and disingenuous line of questioning.
TRUMP: First of all, I don't think I've ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, a first question. You don't even say, "Hello," "How are you?" Are you with ABC? Because I think they are a fake news network, a terrible network. And I think it's disgraceful that I came here in good spirit. I love the Black population of this country, I've done so much for the Black population of this country. Including employment, including opportunity zones with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, which is one of the greatest programs ever for Black workers and Black entrepreneurs.
...
I think it's a very rude introduction. I don't know exactly why you would do something like that. And let me go a step further, I was invited here, and I was told my opponent—whether it was Biden or Kamala—I was told my opponent was going to be here. It turned out my opponent isn't here. You invited me under false pretense. //R SCOTT: Mr. President I would love for you to answer the question...
TRUMP: I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That's my answer.
R SCOTT: Better than President Johnson who signed the Voting Rights Act?
} TRUMP: That's my answer. //
And leave it to a Democrat apparatchik to invoke Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the most racist presidents in history, second only to Woodrow Wilson. While Johnson claims the Voting Rights Act, it was overwhelming Republican support that allowed it to be passed into law. So, Scott is either not much of a journalist or not very bright, to bypass these factors. //
TRUMP: The inflation is absolutely destroying our middle class, our working class, virtually every class. Inflation is a disaster in our country. Inflation is a country buster, it breaks every country. And we had, in my opinion, the worst inflation we've ever had—they say it's 58 years but I think it's much more than that—it's been devastating. ...
HARRIS F: What's your plan?
TRUMP: You know what we have to do, we have to bring down cost of energy, and that's going to bring down the cost of inflation. This was all started by a bad energy policy by Joe Biden. //
Faulkner asked the question that got an answer that is a reflection of what Trump deems important not only in a VP candidate, but what elicits respect and admiration from him as a person. Faulkner interjected, "Why did you choose him?" Trump gave a full-throated, 10-toes down response.
Trump War Room @TrumpWarRoom
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PRESIDENT TRUMP on @JDVance: I chose him because he is a very strong believer in WORK and the working man and woman who have been treated very unfairly.
3:46 PM · Jul 31, 2024
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.”
Now Facebook has been forced to admit that they erroneously censored one of the photos taken immediately after Trump was shot by a 20-year-old sniper at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13. The picture, showing a defiant Trump, depicted the former president rising to his feet and yelling, ”Fight! Fight!” as blood streamed down his face. It instantly became one of the most iconic photos of our times. //
A post on Mark Zuckerberg’s social media site by a user with the handle End Wokeness that showed the Republican presidential candidate defiantly pumping his fist in the air while blood streams down his face had initially been flagged as misinformation.
The user was threatened with being deplatformed.
However, on Monday, Dani Lever, a spokesperson for the social network’s parent company, Meta, admitted the tech giant made a “mistake.”
If you look at what the left has done, they have radically taken this out of context and, in fact, aggressively lied about what I’ve said. The left has increasingly become explicitly antichild and antifamily. They’ve encouraged young families not to have children at all because of concerns over climate change.
Gowdy attempted to trap Vance by pointing out that numerous Americans, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, and Founding Father George Washington never had biological children. By highlighting these people, Gowdy aimed to challenge Vance's views on the importance of family structure, suggesting that childlessness does not diminish one's ability to serve the country effectively or possess strong leadership qualities. This rhetorical move was intended to put Vance on the defensive and question the validity of his stance on the matter.
Here is a shocker: Vance agreed with Gowdy's assessment because the Fox News host completely missed the point of what Vance was saying in 2021 or purposely misinterpreted it.
Vance said:
Vance agreed with Gowdy’s assessment that “direct offspring are not necessary to be fully invested in the future of this country,” but went on to say being a parent “really does transform your perspective.”
“So this is not a criticism, and was never a criticism, of everybody without children. That is a lie of the left. It is a criticism of the increasingly antiparent and antichild attitude of the left,” Vance said. //
"I’m going to keep on calling that out, because I think it’s important for parents to have a voice,” he said. “I’m proud to be on the ticket with President Trump, a real defender of parents and families."
Kamala Harris has failed her way upward farther than any other 59-year-old woman, with the help of a few male politicians she smarmed. She is attractive to many and non-threatening.
At heart, however, Harris is a radical leftist who’s left no detectable trail of actual accomplishments anywhere – except getting elected in predictably Democrat California.
She’s shown no signs of even mediocre management skills; more than 90 percent of her staff has quit since 2021.
Her 2020 primary bid cratered before a single vote was cast. She reportedly does little to no homework for public appearances. It shows. She looks unserious.
Harris’ judgment is seriously suspect for a wannabe leader of the free world. When the prime minister of Israel, America’s main Mideast ally confronting Iran, visited the White House last week, Harris chose instead to speak to a sorority convention in Indiana. //
Harris’ speaking style comes from the Prof. Irwin Corey School of Rhetoric. Her remarks are replete with impressive words assembled in nonsense order, pauses as if she’s crafting deep thoughts, big hand gestures to distract from empty words, and a laugh that resembles something else.
She also often relies on condescension. (That means talking down to people like this.) //
Trump has called Harris “a lunatic,” which she isn’t. He needs to leave the cheesy attack stuff to JD Vance and outline his own recharged vision for the country’s future, which conveniently would enhance his presidential stature to swing voters.
And be careful in his public remarks. There is a double standard in U.S. politics that is not fair but very real. While women have long encountered a glass ceiling in politics, they also need to appear respected in confrontations with men, even if it's undeserved.
Bullying is counter-productive, and condescension can be lethal. //
Even after four years of covering for a failing man who kept calling her the president, what Harris has going for her is a fresh face, her age (59), and not being Donald Trump.
Harris even handed the worrisome age issue back to Republicans. Trump would be 82 at his term’s end, older than Biden now.
Trump revulsion remains strong among millions. It was key to Biden’s win four years ago. With a flailing Biden atop the 2024 ticket, Democrats likely gave up hope of finally terminating Trump’s presence inside their heads. Many would have thrown away their vote on a third party or stayed home on Election Day, which would cripple down-ticket Democrats.
Not anymore. No one should disregard or underestimate the power of that energizing factor. It could fade. Or endure. //
What ought to concern GOP strategists is that right now, even after the messy coup and before the anticipated big bounce, Harris is surprisingly close to Trump, perhaps ahead.
On Tuesday, journalist Julie Kelly posted court documents on X showing Special Counsel Jack Smith “admitted the FBI added cover sheets to alleged classified documents found at MAL and took photos for evidence.”
“This confirms my report from last month that the FBI doctored evidence to produce stunt photos of classified documents at [Mar-a-Lago],” Kelly said. //
The FBI purchased glossy cover sheets to use in photos of authorities’ unprecedented raid of former President Donald Trump. //
Prosecutors admitted to mishandling the evidence triggering the delay demanded by the judge which now threatens the possibility for Smith’s team to go to trial before the November election.
According to Kelly on Tuesday, the FBI’s colored cover sheets were included in “classified discovery” implicating prosecutors’ desire to keep the details of the added documents concealed from the public.
“The FBI brought colored classified cover sheets to the raid under the guise of using them to substitute classified documents found within Trump’s boxes,” Kelly wrote on X. “Instead, FBI agents attached the scary looking sheets to various files and took photos.”
The images published by prosecutors became emblematic of the former president’s apparent irresponsibility illustrated from the raid.
Cannon ruled Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause and granted the motion to dismiss the indictment against Trump. //
Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday threw out the lawfare prosecution against former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents after finding the Biden administration unconstitutionally appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith. //
“None of the statutes cited as legal authority for the appointment … gives the Attorney General broad inferior-officer appointing power or bestows upon him the right to appoint a federal officer with the kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith,” the ruling states.
Cannon ruled Congress is granted via the Constitution a “role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers.”
“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon ruled. “If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so.” //
“If there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, let alone a former President,” Thomas opined.
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.
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.
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.