It just might be the most personal hiring decision President-elect Trump will ever make, but if he’s already chosen, he’s keeping the contenders in suspense.
After surviving two assassination attempts in roughly two months, Donald Trump is in the awkward position of owing his life to the Secret Service agents and officers who intervened to protect him, even as he remains deeply critical of the failures that allowed the near-misses to occur.
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Secret Service leaders meddled in an independent government investigation of the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and are still not following many basic agency security protocols for presidential candidates, presidents, and vice presidents in the final days before the election, according to emails reviewed by RealClearPolitics and several sources in the Secret Service community.
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The bipartisan House task force on the first assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump released its interim report Monday morning, finding “an unclear chains of command” in the security at site of the incident, a July 13 campaign rally.
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The U.S. Secret Service and the FBI are downplaying the threat to former President Donald Trump posed by a man arrested outside a California rally Saturday night – despite assertions made by a local sheriff that his detention likely thwarted a third assassination attempt.
Deputies working for the Riverside County sheriff’s office arrested a man, identified as Vem Miller, and subsequently discovered a shotgun, loaded handgun, and high-capacity magazine in his car about a quarter mile from the entrance to Trump’s campaign rally in Coachella Valley. Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, who endorsed Trump publicly in June, said Miller’s car, identified as a black SUV, had a fake license plate that was unregistered and possessed several phony passports and driver’s licenses with different identities, as well as what Bianco described as a fake press pass.
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The nonprofit organization Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) is preparing to sue the U.S. Secret Service over what it alleges are “arbitrary” diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) guidelines at the agency.
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No, Donald Trump didn’t grab the wheel of his presidential limousine and try to commandeer it. Yes, Nancy Pelosi felt responsible for security lapses at the Capitol, including the failure to pre-position National Guard there.
There’s no doubt that Trump did in fact order the Pentagon to send troops to secure the U.S. Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, certification of electoral votes, but political and military brass declined to do so. And yes, there were both intelligence and security blunders by police that led to the breach of one of America’s most storied buildings.
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A Secret Service agent has been accused of sexually assaulting a staffer who works for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to four sources in the Secret Service community.
The incident in question took place sometime over the last week during a trip devoted to providing advance security work and planning for a Harris campaign event in Wisconsin that ultimately did not take place. Several Harris staffers and Secret Service agents were in Green Bay to provide advance security and other planning for an upcoming Harris campaign event. The Harris campaign opted to go to Atlanta instead of Wisconsin on Friday, Sept. 20.
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The Senate Homeland Security Committee unveiled a report Wednesday detailing the “preventable” Secret Service security failures that resulted in the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump on July 13.
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A Pakistani man trying to help Iran assassinate Donald Trump gets waived into the United States. An American who would later try to shoot Trump is flagged at the border but gets no follow-up. A young man acting suspiciously at a Trump rally isn’t confronted until he starts firing. And agents fail to confront a future would-be assassin after getting a tip about illegal weapons.
The back-to-back assassination attempts against the 45th president and current GOP nominee have exposed glaring failures and vulnerabilities inside several federal law enforcement agencies and prompted painful questions about whether the FBI and Secret Service are too lax when it comes to proactive security.
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Ryan Routh, the suspected Donald Trump assassin, was interviewed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials when he returned from Ukraine last year and flagged for further investigation based on spontaneous comments he made to agents, but the Homeland Security Department declined to act, Just the News has confirmed.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday the state has the jurisdiction to prosecute Ryan Wesley Routh for attempted murder and will be more transparent in its investigation than the federal government.
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Former President Donald Trump is safe and unharmed following an apparent assassination attempt Sunday afternoon in which gunshots were fired in his vicinity while he was playing golf at the Trump International Golf Course, in West Palm Beach, Florida.
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The Secret Service is responding to a shooting near former President Donald Trump as he left his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, law enforcement sources reported.
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On Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I anticipated a busy but relatively calm day at the White House.
I was the special assistant to the president for management and administration, and President George W. Bush was in Sarasota, Florida, promoting the No Child Left Behind legislation. The senior official in the White House was Vice President Dick Cheney. First lady Laura Bush was scheduled to travel to Capitol Hill to brief senators on early childhood education. On the South Lawn, tables were being set up for that evening’s congressional barbecue.
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A whistleblower told Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri in a letter released on Tuesday that the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents assigned to former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, were “egregiously under-prepared.”
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The Secret Service failures at last month’s Trump rally were foreshadowed in once-redacted passages from a Jan. 6 after-action report that was shared with agency brass weeks before the Butler, Pa., assassination attempt and exposed harrowing blunders that may have put the lives of Mike Pence and Kamala Harris in jeopardy.
The redacted sections from a recently released Homeland Security inspector general report, obtained by Just the News, chronicle how Pence’s escape vehicle left its post without explicit permission and left him stranded at an increasingly violent scene at the Capitol.
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A non-profit organization has started its own investigation into the Secret Service’s use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices that many have suggested has compromised the quality of the agency’s protection, following the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump last month.
According to Fox News, the investigation is being carried out by the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a Colorado-based non-profit. MSLF’s probe will take a closer look at how DEI has negatively affected the agency’s hiring, retention, and promotion of agents, prioritizing race- and gender-based identity politics over competence.
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Authorities and local businesses are bracing for thousands of pro-Palestine protestors to descend on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which kicks off on Monday.
Bracing for riots and looting, some businesses located downtown have already started boarding up windows and doors in preparation for potential protest violence as the convention begins. It’s not as if they haven’t been warned: Some anti-Israel protestors have compared their plans to the 1968 riots during the Democratic convention.
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Rancor, recriminations, and serious formal misconduct complaints have plagued all levels of the Secret Service detail assigned to protect former President Donald Trump over the last year, distracting the team from its core mission of securing Trump from physical harm and preventing an assassination.
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The Butler Township Police Department (BTPD) on Friday declined to provide The Pennsylvania Daily Star with the name of the police officer who claimed to warn the U.S. Secret Service about the possibility of an assassination attempt in a June 13 bodycam video released by the department Thursday.
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Newly acquired police body cam video includes audio in which a local police officer moments after the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally complains about the Secret Service not having cover the rooftop from which the sniper shot.
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Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.
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Just days after Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe denied playing a direct role in rejecting repeated requests for added security measures and assets for former President Trump, whistleblowers have come forward refuting those claims and blaming Rowe for some of the agency’s security failures that led to the July 13 assassination attempt that nearly killed Trump and left rallygoer Corey Comperatore dead and two others wounded.
Other whistleblowers are coming forward citing more systemic problems with the Secret Service, the vaunted agency whose primary job is to protect presidents, vice presidents and former presidents and their families.
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The Secret Service developed intelligence that there was a “high potential for violence” before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but failed to share that information with its agents guarding Donald Trump, Mike Pence or Kamala Harris that fateful day, according to a bombshell report delivered to Congress on Thursday that exposed a fresh round of failures by the presidential protection agency.
Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari’s report was forced into the public by pressure from House Administration Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., and it confirmed earlier Just the News reporting, including that the Secret Service whisked Harris, then the Vice President-elect, within 20 feet of an undetected pipe bomb at Democrat National Committee (DNC) headquarters in Washington because it failed to employ its normal explosive detection tools.
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Few Americans trust the United States Secret Service to keep presidential candidates safe before the November election, according to a Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Friday.
Only about three out of ten Americans say they are “extremely” or “very confident” that “the Secret Service can keep presidential candidates safe from violence before the election,” according to the AP-NORC poll. U.S Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her position on July 23 following an evasive testimony before Congress about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
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Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
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Google’s search engine conspicuously left out Donald Trump in autocomplete suggestions for “assassination,” “assassination attempt” and even “president donald” Sunday, drawing criticism from social media users including X owner Elon Musk that it was censoring recent history.
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The lead sharpshooter of the SWAT Team working alongside the U.S. Secret Service during the attempted assassination against former President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the group had “no communication” with the agency until after the shooting.
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The United States Secret Service reportedly urged former President Trump to stop holding outdoor rallies, citing security concerns in the wake of the assassination attempt, sources told the Washington Post Tuesday.
Secret Service officials urged Trump to stop holding rallies with large crowds outdoors in the wake of security failures during the attempted assassination of Trump at his outdoor rally at Butler Farm Show in Butler, Pennsylvania, USSS sources told the Washington Post. Trump’s campaign team is reportedly looking to hold more rallies in indoor spaces and not planning any outdoor events, sources from the Trump team told the Post.
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While Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle frustrated lawmakers Monday with sparse details about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the FBI has disclosed to Congress that the shooter used three encrypted communications apps ostensibly tied to Germany, Brussels and New Zealand and also possessed an arrest photo of an earlier Michigan school shooter, Just the News has confirmed.
In multiple briefings, FBI leaders told lawmakers that the 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’ primary cell phone has become an important focal point of the probe, including some 14,000 images that were found on it, according to multiple sources familiar with the briefings. The FBI has not issued an update on their findings to the public since July 14.
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The Secret Service confirmed Friday agency Director Kimberly Cheatle will testify as planned at a July 22 House Oversight Committee hearing about the assassination attempt on GOP nominee Donald Trump.
The committee is investigating the security lapses at former President Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania last weekend where a gunman opened fire, killing one and wounding three others, including the former president himself.
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For over a half century the proponents of DEI and its intellectual precursors have fought from high ground, not from a moral position, but a tactical and strategic one secured by Marxist indoctrination that has pervaded nearly every corner of society.
The deliberate and methodical campaign has successfully muted public criticism, although privately most Americans felt that there is something terribly wrong with a philosophy that prioritizes appearance over ability. DEI’s commanding role in all branches of the military has resulted in no tangible benefits but a myriad of failures—falling morale and standards, recruitment shortfalls, plummeting public confidence in the military, poor leadership, and with the exception of the Marine Corps, the inability to fulfill basic mission requirements at an acceptable level.
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Less than five days after the failed assassination attempt on GOP nominee and former President Donald Trump, several questions still remain about how and why the shooter – Thomas Matthew Crooks – was able to gain access to the rooftop with an unobstructed view over the rally and the crowd. Six of the biggest security failures that reportedly occurred at the event raise even more questions for investigators.
The investigation into the assassination attempt that left one attendee dead, and three injured including Trump, is being led by the FBI. However, the bureau has remained relatively quiet on its probe, publishing only one update so far on Monday, July 15.
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Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper during his failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last Saturday, was reportedly diagnosed with major depressive disorder prior to his death.
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New allegations that Secret Service training resources were reallocated to “executive leadership bonuses” and DEI-prioritized recruitment are among the torrent of charges leveled against agency Director Kim Cheatle and other top officials in the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
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A college in Louisville has placed an instructor on unpaid leave after posting on social media he wished the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump succeeded.
“If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss,” John James wrote in all caps on a post discovered Sunday by Libsoftiktok. The statement was made above a screenshot of a news story on the Saturday shooting during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that left the former president and current Republican nominee injured after a bullet grazed his ear.
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The U.S. Secret Service last Saturday “created the conditions” for 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks to climb onto the roof of a building and take aim at former President Donald Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania rally “deliberately and with malice aforethought,” argued The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis, who led a series of criticisms against the agency on Tuesday.
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House Republican members on the Oversight Committee said Tuesday the Department of Homeland Security has taken over communications between the committee and the U.S. Secret Service and refuses to confirm a time for a briefing that was supposed to take place today.
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Addressing the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said the “buck stops with me” but refused to resign.
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Inflexible Secret Service protocols, overworked special agents, and a decision against deploying more counter snipers to President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania all contributed to creating the opening for a gunman to wound Trump, kill a bystander, and seriously injure two others, according to several sources in the Secret Service community.
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Driving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris by an undetected bomb. Refusing extra resources for a presidential candidate. Admitting an agent on a White House detail assaulted her supervisor.
Long before the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday night such focused a harsh light on the Secret Service, the presidential security agency was already facing difficult questions about its capability, training, recruitment and emphasis on diversity.
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The office of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS-02) was silent Monday when asked by The Tennessee Star whether Thompson, who introduced a bill that would have stripped former President Trump of his Secret Service detail, had reconsidered that bill in light of Trump’s near assassination on Saturday.
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An attendee at former President Donald Trump’s Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania told The Pennsylvania Daily Star that attendees feared the shooter stood among the crowd, and they felt relief only when Trump rose to his feet and raised his fist.
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Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said in a statement released on Monday that her agency will fully participate in the “independent review” President Biden ordered of security surrounding former President Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa. where he was shot.
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Former First Lady Melania Trump issued a statement calling on the nation to unite following Saturday afternoon’s failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
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Billionaire Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of the social media platform X, endorsed former President Donald Trump on Saturday after a gunman attempted to assassinate the former president during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk later called for Secret Service resignations in the wake of the shooting, which left one rally attendee dead and a second injured.
Musk posted a video of the attempted assassination in to X, where he received more than 55 million views at press time, and wrote, “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.”
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Gunshots erupted and Donald Trump was pulled to the ground. About a minute later he stood up, raised his fists defiantly, and was removed by Secret Service into a car and taken from the scene.
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Top officials at the Department of Justice are downplaying recently disclosed documents showing FBI agents were authorized to use deadly force during their 2022 raid of Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.
Responding to Trump’s claim that “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau was following “standard operating procedure” as it executed a search warrant on Aug. 8, 2022, regarding classified material that the former president was holding at Mar-a-Lago.
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The House Oversight and Accountability Committee has launched an investigation into potential vulnerabilities in the Secret Service’s ability to protect President Biden, Vice President Harris, and former President Donald Trump and their families after an incident last month raised new concerns about the agency’s diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring decisions and vetting process.
Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the panel, sent Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle a letter Thursday requesting an agency briefing on the matter by June 13.
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An incident involving a physical attack by a female Secret Service agent tasked with protecting Vice President Kamala Harris is raising questions about whether the agency had thoroughly vetted her during her hiring and whether an ongoing push to increase the numbers of women in the service and boost overall workforce staff played a role in her selection.
The Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris was removed from her duties Wednesday after physically attacking the commanding agent in charge and other agents trying to subdue her, according to an agency spokesman and knowledgeable Secret Service sources.
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