What’s wrong with the secret service – Daily News

Donald Trump is not the first US president to have had two assassination attempts made on him in a short period of time. That happened to Gerald Ford in 1975. On September 2, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the murderous Manson Family cult, tried to shoot Ford in Sacramento, but was stopped. Just 20 days later, Sara Jane Moore shot him in San Francisco. She missed.

At the time, inflation was high and the country had just seen the fall of Saigon after the long and divisive Vietnam War. Ford had become president in August 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and his pardon of Nixon a month later was likely what destroyed his chances of re-election. A little-known former governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, won the Democratic nomination and defeated Ford in 1976.

Four years later, voters ejected Carter from office and elected Ronald Reagan, who was nearly killed by an assassin's bullet two months after taking office.

It is not only Republicans who are targeted for assassination. Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president in November 1963 after John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic candidate in 1968 after the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles.

However, the fact that the numerous attempts on President Trump's life are not an unprecedented incident does not make them any less suspicious – especially given that the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security are blocking investigations and requests for public records from the House and Senate.

Congress was already investigating the assassination attempt at Trump's July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when the second attack occurred on September 15 at Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. The gunman on the mysteriously unguarded rooftop in Butler, Thomas Crooks, was shot dead, but only after bullets believed to have been fired from his gun killed a former fire chief attending the rally, seriously wounded two others and came within a hair's breadth of assassinating the former president.

“We were not able to interview the sniper who killed Crooks,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), the ranking member of the permanent investigative committee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told reporters.

Johnson said they have not received the autopsy report, the toxicology report, a report on the trajectory of the bullets, or any information on how the crime scene was handled. “There is only basic information that we should have right now, and we don't have that,” he said.

The chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, accused the Biden-Harris administration of “obstruction,” a word reminiscent of Watergate. The Department of Homeland Security, Blumenthal said, “has all but neglected its duty by resisting our requests for documents, evidence and information necessary for the investigation.”

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, said: “Since July 13, the Department and the U.S. Secret Service have provided the Senate with numerous briefings, nearly 2,500 pages of documents, and more than 50 hours of transcribed interviews. This was done in cooperation with the House Special Task Force, the President-Chaired Independent Investigative Committee, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Secret Service. [Office of Inspector General]and the Government Accountability Office.”

Those familiar with congressional investigations will immediately recognize the old trick of drowning investigators in time-consuming tedious work with material that has little relevance, while withholding key documents, records, and crucial materials.

A Secret Service spokesperson told Fox News Digital: “The U.S. Secret Service is cooperating with a variety of inquiries and investigations related to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. This includes multiple congressional investigations, including investigations by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Investigation, and a special bipartisan task force in the House of Representatives.”

Is this just the usual whining and moaning of a bureaucracy that refuses to be held accountable for its massive incompetence? Or is there something worse behind it?

But others are now investigating these disturbing events.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed an executive order directing state prosecutors to investigate the second assassination attempt on Trump. Somehow, gunman Ryan Routh, 58, managed to camp outside Trump International Golf Club for nearly 12 hours and then shove a rifle through a fence on the sixth hole as the former president was playing the fifth hole. The Secret Service fired shots and Routh fled, but was later arrested in a traffic stop.

Another investigation, not under the control of the Biden-Harris administration, could be decided in court. America First Legal has filed a lawsuit against the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security for illegally withholding government documents about the first assassination attempt in Butler. Among other things, the AFL wants to see documents on staffing shortages and hiring and employment standards at the Secret Service.

Senator Ron Johnson told News Nation that the Secret Service's budget has increased 65% to $3.3 billion over the past decade and its staff has increased 32% from 6,200 to 8,300. “They're also part of a department, by the way, that has a $190 billion budget and 240,000 staff that they're going to assign to the Secret Service in some of these crisis situations,” he said. “It's not about resources, it's about management.”

Maybe that's the main thing the service wants to keep secret.

Email [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley