Tangle - INTERVIEW: Isaac talks with former Secret Service agent Bill Gage

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

In the wake of the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump. There've been a lot of questions, namely questions about the security and the Secret Service at this Butler, Pennsylvania event.How could something like this happen? How could a 20 year old kid get onto a roof just a few hundred feet away from the former president and get several clean shots, several clean attempts, at his life? Today, we're sitting down with former Secret Service agent Bill Gage to talk about what happened at this Butler, Pennsylvania event, what the failures were of the Secret Service and the security for the event, and what should happen to the director of the Secret Service, whom Bill actually used to work alongside. Today's interview is part of a larger deep dive we are doing on the Secret Service. If you're interested in learning more, you can go to ReadTangle.com and read our latest piece, which looks into the history and the infrastructure of the Secret Service, as well as some analysis of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and where the service failed.Hope you all enjoy the interview. Check out Episode 5 of our podcast series, The Undecideds. Please give us a 5-star rating and leave a comment!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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How could a 20-year-old kid get onto a roof just a few hundred feet away from the former president and get several clean shots, several clean attempts at his life? Today, we're sitting down with former Secret Service agent Bill Gage to talk about what happened at this Butler, Pennsylvania event, what the failures were of the Secret Service and the security for the event, and what should happen to the director of the Secret Service, whom Bill actually used to work alongside. interview is part of a larger deep dive we are doing on the Secret Service. If you're interested in learning more, you can go to readtangle.com and read our latest piece, which looks into the history and the infrastructure of the Secret Service, as well as some analysis of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and where the service failed. Hope you guys enjoy the interview. And again, if you want more, go to readetangle.com and check out our most recent article on the Secret Service.

Bill Gage, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So let's start maybe with just you a little bit so we can give our audience a little bit of background on your experience. Can you talk a little bit about your time in the Secret Service and how you got involved? What kind of roles you held while you were working there? Yeah, absolutely. I was hired by the Secret Service in 2002 as a special agent. I was originally assigned to the Washington field office, which is the busiest office in the

Secret Service just due to its location. You know, the president essentially spends the night there every night in Washington, D.C. when he's not traveling. So the White House is there. All of the centers of government are there. So the Washington field office is a very, very busy office and was kind of thrust immediately into protection within a day or so after graduating the Secret Service Training Academy. You know, I'm what the service calls standing post for then Vice President Cheney. So from about 2002 to 2007, I was assigned to the Washington Field Office of the Secret Service. And then in 2007, I tried out.

It actually took me three attempts to get through the very rigorous and highly selective counter-assault team selection and basic training courses. And finally, in 2007, was able to successfully make it through the CAT basic course. And from 2007 to 2013, I was on the counter-assault team, where for my last two years, I served as a team leader. Got it. So I want to start, I think, in the obvious spot, which is this assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania last weekend. I think I had a reaction that was similar to a lot of Americans' reactions as the details of this started to come out, which is how did this 20-year-old kid who seemed to be basically a

gun hobbyist get onto a roof at a big rally event like this in the middle of campaign season with a clear shot at the president and get a few rounds off before being killed by Secret Service agents? How should we think about this? Is this a failure of the Secret Service, of the local police? I'd be curious to just kind of hear your thoughts and what your initial reaction was as the details of this story broke. Yeah. So like most Americans, I was just going about my day when a friend texted me and said, turn on the news and turned it on. And I saw it and watching it over and over again after it had just happened. I think I turned on the news maybe five minutes or less after it was breaking.

But I'm watching that and I turned to my wife and I said, how in the world did somebody get a gun into the event? And so I was thinking that someone had maybe a 3D printed gun or some kind of wooden gun or some homemade firearm because the magnetometer checkpoints at the Secret Service are very robust. I've manned those checkpoints before, and I don't want to say it's impossible, but essentially there's no way to get a magnetometer through those checkpoints. They are much more robust than what you see at airports, FAA checkpoints. So for somebody to smuggle a weapon into an event, I thought was an astounding possibility. But soon the audio was released. And within a few minutes of me having a discussion, the audio is released. And so then I'm beginning to think, OK, someone was in an elevated position with a rifle. You know, how did that happen? So then, you know, as the news has broke, and I've talked to friends in the service and different sources and research what happened, you know, listen, I know the American public.

the American public and it's sort of human nature, right? People are like, Hey, who screwed up? Whose fault is this? And it's easy to point fingers at the director and at the secret service. But sometimes in these incidents, you know, when, when there's a security breach, you know, most of the ones that I've been involved in and studied, it's a combination of factors that happen, right? It's human error. It's just bad luck sometimes. So to point the finger and say, oh, this is exactly what went wrong and this is exactly who's at fault. You know, generally, there's just a combination of factors, sort of a cascading series of events that happen that lead to these sort of incidences. that happen that lead to these sort of incidences. To the degree that you can, could you explain a little bit about what the Secret Service does going into an event like this? For instance, one of the things that I read was that this building was an area kind of outside the perimeter

that the Secret Service was responsible for, and that the executive, chief executive of the Secret Service, the head of the Secret Service, suggested that local police were expected to be manning that building. And then local police have said they informed the Secret Service they didn't have the manpower to do that. I guess I'm just interested to hear a little bit about what happens before these events and how the responsibility is divvied up with some of the local law enforcement. Yeah, so these events are planned usually a week, sometimes more in advance. You'll have someone from the nearest Secret Service field office. So in this case, it was the Pittsburgh field office. And they'll usually take a relatively senior agent, but sometimes it's not. It could be a junior agent as well, but they pair up with somebody from that individual protective detail and they spend sometimes a week

or more. It just all depends when the event was announced, but sometimes they will spend several days going over the event, doing walkthroughs and meeting with the local police, state police and other federal agencies to secure the perimeter because, you know, generally the local police are used to secure, you know, traffic checkpoints, sort of the outer perimeter. And so you have just meeting after meeting after meeting with the local agencies there to secure the outer perimeter. And so you spend a considerable amount of time with them in the planning process and kind of go over ad nauseum who's responsible for what. And then the Secret Service sort of does security inside the event. And then obviously for the candidate or the Secret Service protecting, in this case, former President Trump, you know, the Secret Service would also have a separate section doing the actual, you know, sort of

close-in protection for him. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. From Searchlight Pictures comes A Real Pain, one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike.

See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. Got a mortgage? Chances are you're thinking about your payments right now. Need help? Ask your bank about relief measures that may be available to you. Learn more at Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada. I'm interested in the moments after the shooting happened as well. It seemed like, you know, there was a pretty swift reaction, obviously, from what we understand, or at least what I've seen reported. A Secret Service sniper shot and killed the shooter in the very moments after. And there's actually video you can find online of the snipers responding to the first shots being fired. And then the Secret Service agents who were there

in the crowd, you know, they storm onto the stage, they surround the president. A lot of people sort of, I saw at least initially these kind of immediate conspiracies about the event being staged or something, which is obviously nonsense. But one of the reasons people were saying that was because Trump had this moment where he sort of, you know, raises his fist and tells the crowd to fight and they're not protecting him, you know, not protecting his head or he's standing taller than some of the agents and they didn't get him off the stage immediately. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what you saw in those initial moments after the shooting happened, what these agents are supposed to do, whether they did it correctly in your view and kind of how that played out.

Yeah. So one of the things you learn in the special agent training course or the SATC, as it's called in Secret Service lingo, one of the first things you learn in SATC, literally the first day, is this two principles. The first one is cover and evacuate, and the second one is maximum to the protecting, minimum to the problem. And so what do those two things mean? So I'll break down the first one, which is cover and evacuate. So if you are, you know, as part of the shift, as the Secret Service calls it, one of the agents working close into the protectee, in this case former President Trump,

if there's an incident, you want to, you know, sort of grab a hold and shield the protectee as quick as you can and get them away from the line of fire. So cover and evacuate. And then sort of the second principle, and these principles go hand in hand, is maximum to the protectee, minimum to the problem. And what that means is if you are one of these agents assigned to do sort of the close-in protection or on the shift, you don't want to necessarily draw your gun and return fire to someone that's

draw your gun and return fire to someone that's posing a threat to the protectee because what you want to do is shield them with your body as much as possible and let somebody else deal with returning fire. Another sort of resource or another section or unit in the Secret Service, let them deal with the person that's posing a threat so that you can shield the protectee with your body. Because if you're returning fire, then no one's there to offer sort of protection to the protectee. So, you know, in this particular case, you know, you had two simultaneous things sort

of happening here from two separate sections of the Secret Service. You had the counter snipers or CS, which is a very storied unit within the Secret Service. Those are the guys on the roof that you mentioned. They're engaging and firing on that person on the roof. And then you had the shift agents within the first round or two, within seconds are jumping on stage to cover and evacuate. So, sorry to be long-winded there, but to circle back, you know, the system worked here, the Secret Service protective system

worked and how exactly how they train the shift agents jumped on stage. They shielded the president. They began the evacuation and Hey, look, you know, it's not like you see on the movies where they jump up and grab a protectee and rush them sprinting at full speed to a car. That's just not real life. And it's kind of a scrum there to get a hold of President Trump and kind of get him to safety. safety. So it might not have been pretty, but it worked. And, you know, if the protectee in this case, former President Trump says, hey, hold on a second, I need to grab my shoes. You know, your first instinct is to try, okay, what is he asking for? Let's just pause for a second, get him what he wants. So, you know, it might not have been pretty and it might not have been the textbook, how it's drawn up on paper, but it still worked. And the basic principles that the Secret Service trains with there and implements, it worked. the shooter scouted the location ahead of the rally. I'm interested, I guess, two questions. First is what leads you to that conclusion? And second is how does something like that get missed by law enforcement or is something like that, you know, an action that we expect law enforcement to pick up on? Well, you know, great question and very hard to peel back the layers on that because, you know, we live in a free democracy.

You know, we are not a surveillance state like Russia or China. And if someone's willing to trade their life for the president or in this case, the former president who's a Republican nominee, if somebody is willing to trade their life for whatever their goal is, their ideological motivations, or if they're mentally ill, if they're willing to trade their life for that, they're going to have a pretty good shot. If the Secret Service had their way, they'd put the president in this big protective bubble, this bulletproof glass, and they would bring him out once a year to wave to the American public. And then they would send him back down to some bomb-proof bunker. But we can't do that in this country, right? We're a free democracy, and our elected officials have to go out and work rope lines and speak to the public. So it's just not possible. So to circle back here,

you said, hey, what makes me think that he scouted the location? Well, he clearly bought a high-powered rifle, and there's some reporting out now that he went to Home Depot, I believe, and bought a ladder. So that tells me that, hey, he knew that he needed to get to an elevated position, and there was one there. It's being reported now that he, after I did that interview about him scouting the location, I think it's come out now that he visited the location the day before. And so when you look at some sort of modern presidential, I hate to use the word assassin, but if you look at the history of Arthur Brimmer, of John Hinckley, even Oswald, all of these individuals scouted these locations that they had the location of their attacks. They scouted them in some cases in some great detail well before the attack. So I think in this case, the Pennsylvania attack on Trump, I think in this case, the shooter clearly had to have some

knowledge that he needed to get up on that building. And that's why he purchased the ladder and he had already planned to use a rifle. So, uh, and you know, to answer your second, the second part of your question there, how does this go undetected? You know, there there's, there's a lot of bad people out there. All right. A lot of people that are mentally, I'm not referring to mentally ill people as bad, but what I'm saying is there's, you know's people that are mentally ill that they're not being treated. They're not receiving counseling. They're not on medication. And with sort of the tone of the political atmosphere in our country, there's a lot of people out there that really hate both candidates. They hate Trump and they hate Biden. And so some of this rhetoric that's out there can sort of inflame and motivate some individuals. So, you know, for someone to go

undetected, what they call in the intel community is leakage. What that means is, you know, sometimes people will telegraph to their friends, family, they'll post on social media that, you know, hey, I hate this person, this person needs to die, or this person's going to get what's coming to them, that sort of language. If they're not posting that stuff and they're not really having any leakage with their friends or family, it's going to be very, very difficult to detect that. Now, the service has a very robust, what's called PID in the service or protective intelligence division where you have dozens and dozens of agents scouring social media for these worrisome posts. I heard my friends say Trump's going to get what's coming to him. I heard my friends say that, you know, Biden should, you know, some great evil should become of President Biden.

So they're filtering through all that data. And if there's no leakage by the person, if it's not being reported, it's going to be very difficult for the Secret Service to detect that. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From Searchlight Pictures comes A Real

Pain, one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th.

Oh, that coffee smells good. Can you pass me the sugar when you're finished? Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? That's salt, not sugar. Let's get you another coffee. Feeling distracted? You're not alone. Many Canadians are finding it hard to focus with mortgage payments on their minds.

If you're struggling with your payments, speak to your bank. The earlier they understand your situation, the more options and relief measures could be available to you. Learn more at Canada.ca slash ItPaysToKnow. A message from the Government of Canada. Canada. You said recently that the Secret Service is stretched thin by the volume and the complexity of its assignments. There are calls now for the head of the Secret Service to resign. I'm interested in kind of what you're hearing to the degree you can share from your colleagues in the service about this moment, about the shooting, where it might be headed. I mean, what's the atmosphere like there? What kind of changes might we see? Do you think the

director should resign? I'm interested to kind of get your perspective on the inside of the Secret Service right now. Yeah, listen, I'm not here to say the, you know, it's not my place to say the director should resign or shouldn't resign. You know, that's up to the director. And frankly, the director works at the behest of the president. And, you know, if the president asked them to resign, they have to because they essentially work for the president's appointed position. So I I worked with the director during my time when before she was rising to the ranks. She's very personable, very competent. And I do think in some case I'm not I'm not friends with her. So I'm not here to defend her. And she's head of the agency, so rightly so. She has a lot of questions to answer for. But to pin the blame solely on the director, I think is disingenuous and frankly not fair. As I mentioned earlier, yeah, she's a head

of the agency and she's responsible for these events. But sometimes in some of these incidences, you know, there's a cascading series of events that happen, uh, human error, bad luck, and, um, dependent all the blame on her. I, I, I just don't think it's fair. You know, you could have George Patton as the head of the secret service or another famous, you know, war, war general. And if there's a faulty security plan, it doesn't matter who the secret service, the, who the director of the secret services, you know, bad things could happen. And I don't mean to diminish the director's position, but I, I'm just saying, you know, you really can't pin all of the blame on her. So, and yeah, absolutely. I think you had another

part of your question there. And absolutely it's stretched then. When I first joined the service in 2002, we were protecting the president, the president's immediate family, the vice president, and maybe the second lady. And by the time I left, we were providing protection to the vice president's grandkids. President Biden's daughters were very active. And just due to the threat level in the world, they were getting very robust protection with multiple agents. What used to be maybe one or two agents protecting Barbara and Jenna Bush had ballooned up to multiple agents, essentially 24-hour protection. Even they were getting cat assets. So I worked President Obama's daughters many, many times on cat. So that sort of increased protection

bubble has really stretched the Secret Service thin. And the resources devoted to the Secret Service, the resources allotted by Congress just haven't kept up with that demand. to the Secret Service. The resources allotted by Congress just haven't kept up with that demand. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I guess from a solutions-oriented perspective, somebody who I guess is now on the outside looking in and has so much experience at the agency, what kind of reforms or changes might you focus on if you were trying to solve that problem? Great question. And thank you for asking. Because really nobody else out there, especially in your line of work are saying, hey, how could we fix this and prevent it from happening again? Right now, people just want to point the finger. So thank you for asking. I'm not here to cheerlead

for the Secret Service. But you know, I am loyal to the agency because I worked there for so long. But listen, no other agency in the government is more vital to the functioning of our democracy. I have great friends in the FBI. I have tremendous respect for the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies, ATF, DEA. But as far as an agency that's vital to the functioning of our democracy, no one is more important than the Secret Service. You know, I don't want to get political here, and I don't mean this in a political sense, but, you know, you would essentially have a January 6 every day if it wasn't for the Secret Service, okay? The president and the vice president have to make decisions based on their best judgment and not under threat of violence. And if you don't have the Secret Service, then you don't have a functioning democracy. And so what changes would I make? directors had an incredible opportunity to sort of ask for increased funding to better technology, to have more agents. And I know that doesn't happen overnight. You can't just go out and hire a bunch of Secret Service agents. You can't just make a factory of agents. They have to

undergo background checks, their screening, they have to successfully pass the training. But I think over time, you know, this is just kind of sort of cascaded where the Secret Service traditionally hasn't asked for more resources. So I would allot, you know, a ton of money when you look at the FBI's budget compared to the Secret Service budget, not even close. I think the FBI's budget is around $9 to $11 billion. I could be wrong in the exact number. And the Secret Service budget pales in comparison. So one of the first things I would do would be to increase the budget astronomically and increase the allotted agents astronomically to really increase the size of the agency so that you don't have agents stretched so thin. So, you know, looking at Pennsylvania, perfect world, you would have had 500 agents there and 30 counter sniper teams, but that's just not the reality. The Secret Service doesn't have those sorts of resources. And, you know, one more thing, one of the other things I would do, listen, we have an incredible agency in this country called DARPA, which is Defense Advanced

Research Agency, that every single military sort of technology that's come out in the last, you know, 50 years has come from DARPA, whether it's MREs, the Predator, Tomahawk missile, the internet even was developed by DARPA. So I would really encourage the Secret Service to partner with some of the defense industry to really increase some of the screening technology to better screen some of these crowds. I love it. Bill Gage, thank you so much for giving us some of your time and expertise. I appreciate it very much. And as the story develops,

maybe we can have you back on the show sometime. Yep, I'd love to come back. Have me anytime. Thank you.