By Ben Johnson | AMAC Outside Contributor
The Biden administration has intervened to prevent the Secret Service from briefing a House committee investigating the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, a member of the committee told Family Research Council.
“After the Secret Service agreed to brief members of the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security took over communications with the committee and has since refused to confirm a briefing time,” said a statement from the Oversight Committee emailed to FRC from Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.. “The Oversight Committee has a long record of bipartisan oversight of the Secret Service, and the unprofessionalism we are witnessing from the current DHS leadership is unacceptable.”
“We were scheduled for a first briefing today,” confirmed Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, but “DHS has stepped in between the communications now of the Secret Service and the Oversight Committee, and are now trying to control the communication between the two committees.”
“Already they’re obfuscating, it would seem,” said Cloud.
The briefing to the House Oversight Committee would precede a full committee hearing on the Trump assassination attempt with the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, next Monday, July 22, at 10 a.m. Cloud noted that Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has issued subpoenas to assure Cheatle shows up.
At least three congressional committees are now investigating the near-fatal shooting in Butler, Pa. last Saturday. In addition to the House Oversight Committee hearing, Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, announced the House Judiciary Committee plans to question FBI Director Christopher Wray next Wednesday. And the House Committee on Homeland Security, led by Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., will interview the leaders of the DHS, FBI, and Secret Service.
“The United States Secret Service has a no-fail mission, yet it failed on Saturday when a madman attempted to assassinate President Trump, killed an innocent victim, and harmed others. … [Q]uestions remain about how a rooftop within proximity to President Trump was left unsecure,” said Comer. “Americans demand answers from Director Kimberly Cheatle about these security lapses and how we can prevent this from happening again.”
Several questions hang over the Secret Service’s handling of the near-fatal shooting by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired eight shots from the top of the AGR International Inc. factory.
Tim Miller, a former Secret Service agent and founder of Lionheart International Services Group, told FRC President Tony Perkins, “One of the first things you start with as a site agent, and we learned this in November of 1963,” is to ask, “‘Where are the high places where someone with a rifle could shoot and kill the president?’”
“Unfortunately, the biggest thing that we look at from day one was missed,” said Miller.
Cheatle admitted she placed agents inside the building from which the shooter staged his attempted murder instead of on top of it, because the structure had a sloped roof. Apparently, the Secret Service inside the building could not hear the shooter climbing the side of the business and walking on the roof above them.
Numerous eyewitnesses alerted law enforcement to the presence of a man on the roof with a rifle.
A policeman from the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit took a picture of Crooks and called in a suspicious presence at 5:45 p.m., 28 minutes before the shooting, according to local reporter Nicole Ford of WPXI.
Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., told CNN Tuesday morning that the Secret Service’s serial failures were so amateurish that authorities must investigate whether they were “intentional” or merely incompetence. “The amount of negligence, the amount of mistakes that were made here, I have a very difficult time not leading myself towards [thinking] this was intentional instead of fecklessness.” He called for Congress to establish a “J-13 commission,” apparently similar to the Jan. 6 committee.
“These are not difficult advances,” said Mills, a former military sniper. “This is not a political thing,” he said. The American people need “a proper investigation on all levels to ensure this doesn’t happen again and our president can be safe.”
“I’ve been making my own calls to Secret Service agents that I know that are willing to talk to me off the record. And there are a lot of severe problems,” revealed Biggs on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Tuesday. “I would like to find out who is the lead agent who got there and ran the advance. I want to see what the agent asked for as far as material, manpower, etc., and whether he was denied some of that. The other thing I would like to know is where [were] the counter snipers? Were they green-lighted, or were they told that they were going to have to hold? And if they were told they were going to have to hold, I want to know who the supervisor was who made the determination to hold. And when they saw the actual shooter.”
Like many others, Biggs blamed a politically correct culture focused on “equity” rather than quality in hiring Secret Service agents.
“Cheatle has put a focus on DEI,” said Biggs. Cheatle announced she aimed to assure that 30% of Secret Service agents are female by 2030. In 2021, more women than men graduated from the service’s training classes. “This is all about DEI,” said Biggs. He charged Cheatle with laying aside “merit-based hirings” and becoming “willing to take anybody that she thinks” meets “her diversity goals.”
“That’s not the way their mission is designed,” said Biggs. “The DEI hires are so bad.”
Several female Secret Service agents appeared unable to cover Trump’s head on Saturday evening or even to holster their pistols safely.
Miller said, due to the director’s laser-like focus on DEI—which the Biden-Harris administration has made a whole-of-government undertaking—members of preferred classes “are not being evaluated” thoroughly before being hired. “They’re actually saying, ‘Oh, well, you’re this particular group, so come on in.’ And I think that will compromise the mission.”
“There are a lot of problems and challenges,” said Miller. “And it starts with saying, ‘We’re not going to hire the brightest and the best. We’re only going to hire’” members of specified demographic groups.
These groups tend to vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party.
The Biden administration doubled down on its decision to elevate accidents of birth in the hiring process. “Our strength comes from our diversity,” stated Secret Service Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi.
The Biden administration has strongly supported Cheatle, who spent 27 years in the Secret Service, including several years on then-Vice President Joe Biden’s security detail, insisting her leadership is not to blame. “I have 100% confidence in the director of the United States Secret Service, a dedicated, career-long law enforcement officer,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told NPR.
But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., said he posed probing questions to Mayorkas “within hours” of the shooting. “He didn’t have a lot of those answers,” said Johnson, who called the impeached secretary’s responses “concerning.”
Trump’s security team transformed dramatically between his shooting and the moment he entered the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. On Monday evening, Trump strode into the Fiserv Forum to the strains of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” flanked by at least 10 male Secret Service agents and one female.
Critics say the Biden administration has a history of treating the American people as enemies, unworthy of knowing the inner workings of their own government. “This is coming from the same administration who was labeling Catholics as terrorists, people who go to school board meetings as terrorists, yet they fail to protect a former president of the United States and a political opponent. We’ve seen this administration target political opponents before,” said Cloud.
A Senate committee is set to receive a briefing on Wednesday. “It’ll be just the tip of the iceberg,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told “Mornings with Maria” Wednesday morning.
Next Monday’s House Oversight Committee hearing will be livestreamed on the committee’s website, oversight.house.gov.
Biggs acknowledged the heroism and how “the first agent hops up on that podium right away [and] doesn’t look towards where the shot came from. He’s going in to provide cover,” he recounted, even at the potential cost of his life. Comer also saluted “the brave Secret Service members who put their lives at risk to protect President Trump and for the American patriots in the audience who helped innocent victims.”
“There was good, bad, and ugly in this incident with Donald Trump,” said Biggs.
But the bad and the ugly leave disturbing questions House Republicans promise to investigate until the end.
“What we saw play out on Saturday night is the greatest indicator that we have a problem that we are refusing to look in the eye and deal with,” said Miller, “and that’s going to lead to nothing but danger and destruction down the road.”
