The House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump released its final report on Tuesday. The report covers the July 13 wounding of President-elect Trump at Butler, Pennsylvania, and the September 15 assassination attempt in West Palm Beach, Florida. //

So, the Secret Service was notified at 2:30 a.m. that Trump would play golf. He arrived at the golf course around 11 a.m. At 1:30 p.m., Trump having been on the golf course for about two hours, the Secret Service is conducting its preliminary sweep of the golf course boundary and discovers the shooter. The shooter, Ryan Wesley Routh, had been in his shooting position since 1:59 a.m. This latter data point is not mentioned in the report.

I'm not a highly trained Secret Service agent; I'm just a dumb sh** infantryman from Southside Virginia, but if I'd been given that mission, I would have conducted a preliminary sweep of the golf course sometime after dawn, placed observation posts at key spots and then done a rolling sweep after the golf party started moving. I would not have started my first pass over the golf course as Trump was playing through.

But it gets a lot better. //

The agent who discovered Routh fired six rounds (they think) at the gunman from a distance of five feet, scoring a perfect goose egg. //

How does any human miss a target basically within arm's reach? How do you get within five feet of a gunman without seeing anything (rhetorical question: you probably have your earbuds in, listening to tunes or a podcast, and daydreaming about what you're going to do when you get off shift)? And how, in the name of all that is Holy, can't you definitively tell how many rounds were fired? "[B]elieved six shots in total were fired" is NOT a number. Don't they keep track of ammunition in the Secret Service? Don't they have an SOP for loading magazines? How will "final ballistics" help determine this if you apparently don't know how many rounds you started out with? //

The Secret Service is a broken organization. A shameful performance by Director Kimberly Cheatle at a congressional hearing (BREAKING: Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Resigns After Disastrous Hearing – RedState) and the juvenile "I'm a public servant" rant by Acting Director Ronald Rowe last week (MUST SEE: Screaming Fight Between GOP Rep, Secret Service Director at Trump Assassination Attempt Hearing) are just the most visible indicators of an organization that is just not capable of carrying out its mission of protecting the president.