Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: AP
At Donald Trump’s rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, a shooter managed to set up on a rooftop with a semi-automatic rifle and fire on the former president from just 150 yards away. The Secret Service now faces intense scrutiny for its inability to stop him before the attack even began. How were agents tasked with protecting the former president unable to prevent an assassination attempt so obvious that bystanders were pointing out the suspect to authorities in real time? To understand how things went so wrong, I spoke with former agent and University of New Haven criminal-justice professor Robert McDonald.
From your perspective, when did things begin to go wrong for the Secret Service on Saturday?
What went wrong here began with the advance process, which lasts about a week. Secret Service agents will come into the city and do an analysis of all the venues: the airport, the open-air venue there. They look at the hospital. They monitor the motorcade routes. We don’t use Google Maps. We actually go out and ride around to make sure all the streets are opened and usable. Just before the visit, the entire plan is approved off by a cadre of supervisors who ask all of the “What if” questions: “What about that roof over there — how close is that? What are we using to mitigate that situation?” And then the protectee comes in and you have the event. Hopefully it’s a good speech and then he gets back in the car, he goes to the airport, and off we go. And that did not happen here.
During the advance process, how would agents approach securing a roof that is 150 yards away with a clear line of sight to the podium?
The question would be “How are we making sure that nobody gets on that roof with a high-powered rifle?” The agent at the time would be saying, “Well, we have police coverage,” or “We’ve got all the doors locked, and there’s no ladders, and we’re going to post somebody around this place to make sure nobody gets up there.”
So the Secret Service is going to have to look hard at itself to find out what happened here, why it happened, how it happened, and, more importantly, how do we move forward and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Is the rally in Butler cleaned up at this point, or is everything still as it was for the investigation?
After the assassination attempt, the Secret Service becomes the interim federal presence and maintains that crime scene. But the FBI is the investigating agency on anything of this nature because the Secret Service really couldn’t investigate a crime that involved its own security apparatus to try to prevent it.
The Washington Post reports that the Secret Service relied on local police authorities to help boost its presence at the rally — apparently a common occurrence in recent years. Another report, from ABC News, states that the building where the would-be assassin fired from was the staging area for the local police team tasked with observing the crowd. Did you rely on local officials like that during your tenure, and how might that reliance have affected the response on Saturday?
Any time the Secret Service goes on a protective visit, whether it’s the president, vice-president, or former presidents, the agents cannot do what they do by themselves. So the Secret Service is very good at liaison-ing and working with other partners. But they are the developers of the security plan and get buy-in and cooperation from state, local, and other federal authorities to implement the plan. The bottom line is that the buck stops with the Secret Service.
We train and train and train for this type of thing and hope we never have to utilize what we train. There were some positives with the way that the team reacted, but I think, obviously, the main point of contention here is going to be “How did we miss that shooter on the roof? How did that happen?” And that’s going to take some serious investigation by Congress, I think. And there may have to be, and rightly so, some accountability on the part of the Secret Service.
It’s hard to imagine that this was the last-ever Trump rally. How do you expect the Secret Service to alter its preparation and response for Trump’s open-air events moving forward?
I think what the Secret Service is going to be doing — and I hope they do it — is to use this serious incident as a reset. Let’s continue to do what we do and know how to do it well. But we have to continue to be vigilant. We have to continue to pay attention to detail. This is a time for a reset to make sure that we’re as tight as we need to be with all of the various aspects of a protective advance and a protective visit. So I’m hoping that with the other things that have happened to the Secret Service over the last couple of years — the White House cocaine and the attempted carjacking last year — that they will find a way to make some positive changes in the way business has been done out of this unfortunate incident.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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