Member-only story
If a twentysomething loner nearly killed a former president, what could a trained assassin do?
I hate wasting people’s time with conspiracy theories. I’ve seen enough major problems with honest mistakes by law enforcement leading to criminal disasters to believe that things like the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump are far more likely to be due to failures and mistakes than malice. Our local, state, and federal law enforcement personnel are good, but they are not ten feet tall, and all it takes is one person to get lucky for us to forget the hundreds or even thousands of times the protective details stopped or deterred an attack or plans for an attack.
But this Congressional interchange in the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability between Rep Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican, and Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle is beyond unacceptable:
Rep. Fallon: “How did a 20-year-old loner, with a week’s notice, pick the absolute best location to assassinate President Trump, when the entire Secret Service missed it? Director Cheatle, under your leadership, your agency got outsmarted and outmaneuvered by a 20-year-old. How can we have any confidence that you could stop a trained professional from a nefarious nation-state?”
Director Cheatle: “Those are absolutely questions that we need to have answers to.”
Yes, there need to be answers, and quickly, because Rep. Fallon is absolutely right about trained professional assassins from nefarious nation-states with far more resources than a 20-year-old.
This isn’t hypothetical. American intelligence services disrupted a plot in the 1990s by Saddam Hussein to kill former president George H.W. Bush after he left office. Saddam Hussein wanted revenge for the Gulf War and came close to getting it. More recently, the Iranian government wants revenge for Trump’s successful effort by the United States to kill a key Iranian general during a trip to Iraq.
Perhaps Saddam should have sent a backwoods American who learned to hunt and target shoot as a teenager rather than spending the money to send trained professionals?
Using the words of Director Cheatle: “The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders. On July 13th, we failed. As the…
