Secret Service Prep Before Trump Shooting Shows It Was a Clown Show

You can use big words and insider acronyms to explain yourselves. Still, the Secret Service oversight of the Butler, Pa., site of Donald Trump's near-assassination can best be summed up in these three simple words: a clown show. If you hadn't figured that out by now, it was unwittingly confirmed during a news conference (see below) Friday.

The stunning stories about the Secret Service brass half-stepping their jobs and holding things together with zip ties and duct tape for the last few years or so appear to be true. I base this on whistleblower reports, Dan Bongino's tirades, and testimony, but I also base the observation on a shocking admission made by the acting chief of this outfit in his presser on Friday.

Now, I first want you to put yourself in the place of a Burger King shift manager, tech CEO, 7-11 night clerk, person planning a vacation, a guy on a sales call with a purchasing manager, platoon commander planning a mission, fashion show coordinator, or, I don't know, perhaps the guy in charge of operations and his site manager of the Secret Service, who are supposed to know that details matter.

"[I]t's a failure to challenge our assumptions, meaning the assumption that, hey, that's going to be addressed or that's going to be covered by state and local," Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe told reporters when they asked him what happened.

They asked, naturally, what changes were being made. Rowe, ever the company man, told them, "I convened a call with all of our special agents in charge of all of our field offices."

Good. Go on.

I expressed to them, listen, we need our state and local counterparts, but we also have to be very direct, very clear about what our expectations are about what we need from them, whether it's a particular asset, whether it's particular numbers of personnel, we need to be very clear so that they have an understanding of exactly what we need from them.
That is that's on us. We need to be better communicators and articulate exactly what we need to mitigate any challenges, concerns, or anything that we identify during that advance process.
[M]oving forward now, we're not going to have this assumption that, oh, we think that they have it. No, we're going to we're going to work together. We're going to have good, hard, fierce conversations about what we're going to do, and then we're going to go out there and we're going to make all of these venues secure moving forward.

Excuse me, but people who hold life and limb in their hands—including those of a former president—don't thoroughly explain what is expected of their local counterparts? That they assume they know? How is this possible? This may explain why no one was covering the roof where the shots came from but not entirely. There are many, many questions about that.

Secret Service had plenty of primary, secondary, and tertiary plans to get Trump surrounded, exfiltrated, and taken to a hospital, but who was supposed to do the spade work of getting the locals to know and understand the mission and all the contingencies, such as how not to get the president killed?

How did that chick blow the assignment so badly? That's right, we've now got two lawmakers who have revealed the person in charge was a woman who is "still on mission" and "working cases" and hasn't been put in front of a whiteboard to write Corey Comperatore's name 152 times. Four for the number of victims the killer hit, one hundred forty for how many yards the shooter was from a president, and eight for how many shots the radical leftist got off before a local cop started shooting, and a Secret Service counter-sniper turned Thomas Crooks' head into a moonscape.

It looks like the gunslingers knew what to do when word finally got to them, another critical error.

In Tuesday's Senate testimony, Rowe admitted that communication between local law enforcement—tasked with helping keep Donald Trump alive—was non-existent. One local guy was "embedded" with agents but couldn't get word out of the Thomas Crooks on the roof before the shooting started. See my stories on the testimony about the utter failures:

I'm glad Rowe saw fit to hold a presser. I hope he does a lot more. It appears that Sen. Rick Scott's (R-Fla.) rebuke of the acting director over not holding meetings with reporters was heard and acted upon.

Behind the scenes, there are many other things the Secret Service must come clean on. More on that in my column for VIPs coming soon.