The Daily Signal - The Crisis Within the Secret Service

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

It has been six weeks since the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the American public’s questions about the nature of the attack and the security failings that led to Trump’s brush with death largely go unanswered. Jason Chaffetz, a Fox News contributor and former Utah Congressman who once chaired the House Oversight Committee, joined The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss the apparent security failures and ongoing investigations into what transpired in Butler on July 13. “I thought the extraction was very slow. I thought it was fairly pathetic,” Chaffetz told The Daily Signal. “It’s been illuminated more now that even though he was the Republican nominee, even though he was the former president, he wasn’t getting the full protective detail that a sitting president would get. And I have a problem with that.” Chaffetz believes the failures are structural. Poor recruitment and training, as well as heavy workloads create a perfect storm for the kinds of security lapses witnessed on July 13 in Butler, Chaffetz suggested. These problems have long plagued the Secret Service. When Chaffetz chaired the House Oversight Committee, he conducted the largest investigation into the Secret Service’s operations in American history. The investigation resulted in a more than 400 page report titled, “United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis.” The former Utah Congressman remains “skeptical” that the current investigations in Congress will yield the policy changes necessary to improve the Secret Service without Congress using the power of the purse to “hold them accountable.” Enjoy the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feeling festive. Catch classic holiday favorites, like Home Alone, the Santa Claus, and Die Hard, along with holiday episodes from Family Guy, Abbott Elementary, and more with Hulu on Disney Plus. From festive Disney flicks to binge-worthy Hulu originals, Hulu on Disney Plus is your home for the holidays. Celebrate the season with Hulu, available on Disney Plus in Canada. It is Tuesday, August 27th, and this is The Daily Signal podcast. I'm Bradley Devlin, the politics editor for The Daily Signal, and today I'll be talking to Jason Chaffetz. Now, you might know Jason as a Fox News contributor, but before that, he served as the congressman from Utah's third district and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

During his time in Congress, he led the largest investigation into the Secret Service in the nation's history. So stay tuned for my interview with Jason Chafetz right after this message. Want the inside scoop on what's happening here at the Heritage Foundation? Check out Herdit Heritage. Heritage. Heritage features cutting-edge analysis and thought from leading experts in and across the conservative movement. And of course, the Heritage Foundation's premier events and programming brought straight to you. Check it out at heritage.org slash podcasts or in the show notes. Joining me now to discuss the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and the

fallout from the Secret Service is Jason Chafetz. Jason, thank you for joining the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. So, first, we just glance right over the fact that there was an attempt on the former president's life. Take me back to that day, July 13th. Where were you when you heard about it? Did you see it live? And what did you think when you saw the president's near brush with death? Well, I was actually at Fox News.

I was going to host the show that was supposed to come on at the conclusion of President Trump's remarks. And as we were sitting there watching the TV, we had gotten all ready. we're getting ready to go sit down in the studio, all of a sudden, you know, something happened and the president was down. And, you know, when it was happening in real time, it was obvious that he had gotten hit. And there wasn't so clear that he was getting back up. And when he did get up and he raised that fist up, it's just this, you know, I still got goosebumps and this, like, oh my gosh, he's, but is he really going to be okay?

sometimes somebody who's shot, you don't know the severity of it. And the extraction seemed to take a long time. And then, you know, I just went right up at Fox to be ready to talk about it. I think it was the first guest on the air to try to talk about it in real time with just watching the pictures like everybody else was watching. So we see that footage, incredibly powerful footage to be sure. But you have an added eye, let's say, for these types of operations from a security. security operations perspective, when you saw that footage for the first time, was there anything that immediately stood out to you? I thought the extraction was very slow. I thought it was fairly pathetic. And I noticed that immediately because in the back of my mind, I know that we had done this investigation where they were supposed to, you know, the training was near zero. I mean, literally around zero. And it just became evident. And even on first glance, you see agents unable to holster their gun, undoubtedly they're nervous. It's the heat of the moment. But then you're also wondering, were shots fired?

Were there multiple shots fired? Where were they fired from? So lots of thoughts running through your mind. And then, you know, were there other people hit? And then all of a sudden you had this shrill of this lady screaming. And, you know, it was obvious there was there was also, you know, loss of life there. And it was, that was devastating. But the big question was, you know, that went on for a while. Is he dead? Is he alive? Is he? Is he? you know, was he hit in the head? But boy, amazing that he got up and he was talking about and he wanted to get his shoe back for goodness sake, right? I mean, it's only Donald Trump, a very inspirational and iconic moment. Yeah, and it was about two hours of heavy hearts for the American people as they

waited to figure out if President Trump was okay. But so incredibly quickly after that, we knew that Congress was going to be looking into this. And we knew that there was something off, something bizarre about this whole incident. Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin really solidified that when he released some findings from an investigated conducted by his office on July 21st. And here's some top lines from that brief. Quote, Secret Service did not attend a security briefing provided to local special weapons and tactics SWAT and sniper teams the morning of July 13, 2024. Local law enforcement notified command about Crooks, the shooter, prior to the shooting and received information that Secret Service was aware of the notification, and Secret Service was initially not going

to send snipers to the rally, according to law enforcement. I mean, does this sound like standard operating procedures for what the Secret Service should be doing, or what is the alternative? Yeah, I think the key word there is should, because they were in a posture that it's been illuminated more now, that even though he was the Republican nominee, even though he was the former president, he wasn't getting the full protective detail that a sitting president would get. And I have a problem with that. And, you know, it obviously was not adequate. It was a complete failure in mission, which is a zero failure mission. And now, look, there were agents that did their job and did it exceptionally well and heroically, you know, got there and, you know,

were willing to take a bullet for the president. But when it became a, evident that it was somebody on a roof able to get a shot in close proximity. How? Why? You've got to be kidding me. And then the video started primarily on X, started coming out really quickly that people had seen the shooter. You know, Homeland Security takes this position of see something, say something. Well, people were saying stuff. They were saying to the local police. They were saying to the Secret Service. And yet this person who was not terribly creative, who was not stealthy, didn't come up with some new thing that we hadn't seen before. He's wearing camel on a white roof. And, you know, to be able to actually hit the president, if not for him turning his

head at the last second, I mean, he would be dead right now. And this country would be in such turmoil. And there's so many things that are wrong with this scene. But And then to have the Secret Service go silent. What other time do we have a disaster in our country where the feds or even the locals just don't say anything? And the Secret Service didn't do a press conference that day. That is so irresponsible. They left it up to the FBI who misled us. We don't know the name of the shooter, but we know he's a 20-year-old male.

How do you know he's a 20-year-old male if you don't know the name? And then they said there's no ongoing threat. How do you know there's no ongoing threat? You just told us you don't even know his name. I mean, it just those were warning signs of things that I had seen in the past where the Secret Service had a culture of deception in misleading the American people to the truth. And I think that's continued through today. There is the culture of deception, but there's also the structural issues with the Secret Service. I think a lot of Americans think of the Secret Service as an institutionalized version of the President's bodyguard, which it is in a lot of ways.

But they don't realize that Secret Service agents are positioned all over the country. And clearly there were failures of communication as laid out previously by Senator Ron Johnson between not only local law enforcement, but within the Secret Service, right? Folks coming in from Washington, D.C., agents there already on the ground. Talk about some of those logistical issues that the Secret Service face. I think when we get through this investigation, my guess is, while you're going to have some human error, there are going to be five key things that we walk away with. Number one, you're going to find that recruitment of agents and officers is a problem.

Number two, the training once they become is totally inadequate. And if you're there for years, the amount of training you're getting is well below any standard that is acceptable. Workload is off the charts incredibly high. The average officer, which is the uniform division, will work more than 560 hours per year overtime. And that's an incredible workload for them to take on. And that's in part because the recruitment is so low and the attrition level is so high that they're short more than 1,000 people. And then you get into technology problems, communications problems. And part of the issue here is they have up more than 100.

150 offices throughout the country. So if you're in the Secret Service, you might be in Seattle or Salt Lake City or Phoenix, Arizona, or, you know, you name the city. There's probably an officer. There's a bigger one in Miami, for instance. The problem is there isn't a President, you know, Trump coming through or a Vice President Harris coming through or Donald Trump Jr. coming through on a regular basis. But in a presidential year, they think it's a surprise every four years. All of a sudden, there's people coming through.

Most of the Secret Service agents are working on financial issues. They are set up to deal with credit card fraud. They're set up to deal with currency problems, currency fraud, counterfeit money. And so you're working in, say, Seattle, and then all of a sudden, Kamala Harris shows up. Guess what? You take off that hat. and then you suddenly are in the protective detail and you haven't been trained up for it.

And I think what you're going to find is that there in Pittsburgh, that field office was overwhelmed because there are these swing states. And if you're working in Michigan or Pennsylvania or Ohio or Nevada, you're just getting overwhelmed and overworked. And the reliance on the locals, locals will do everything you wanted to do, but you don't have time to get them up to speed about the protocols. If you recall, when the president of Trump was shot, agents jumped up. And then it took a little bit.

But then you had somebody come up and they were in full uniform with their gun. They walked across the front of the stage. Normally that cat team is they're called. Normally there's a lot more of them. But you notice two people. That is far short of a full team that would normally be in position to help the president and put down an attacker. What if there were six attackers?

We got lucky in that there was only one, and he was unsophisticated, and he was taken out so quickly. But these are all problems, and I think it really does fall back into those five buckets. And we still don't have most of these questions answered, of course, right? The attempt on Trump's life happens July 13th. Congress goes out of session for the next week for the RNC, where senators are chasing down, the Secret Service Director. She resides in disgrace. Yeah, hilarious. But then Congress comes back the following week, and then they're out of session for six weeks.

We already knew something was bizarre here. Like something strange happened in Butler, Pennsylvania. But instead, Republicans go on vacation for six weeks because they need to raise money from donors in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I mean, if you are in the House and you are the Speaker or you are in House leadership, you control the calendar. Why weren't Republicans doing more about this? saying we just had an assassination attempt on the former president's life. We're not going on vacation until we have more answers here. Well, pretty quickly they had hearings.

But remember, and you heard Senator Johnson from Wisconsin talking about this, there was a very thorough list of questions they need answered. James Comer put together, the chairman of Oversight Committee, the committee I used to oversee, put together a very thorough list. They need the names of the agents there. They need a lot of these details of which Homeland Security is not coughing up. And I can tell you, having done investigations, if I don't know who I can interview or who was on the team last night or who are those snipers, I'm paralyzed in my ability to do it.

So as you heard Senator Johnson, just in the last couple days saying they're stonewalling us. They're not giving us the information. How is that possible? Because Congress, this happens time and time again, not just Secret Service. I'm talking broadly. Congress does not use the most powerful tool that it has, which is the power of the purse. They don't hold them accountable and they don't stand up for themselves. They're good at issuing letters.

They're good at doing press conferences, but they're not very good at actually drilling down and making sure those agencies come up. Why didn't they call Secretary Marcus? He's the Secretary of Homeland Security. He is the one in charge of the Secret Service. instead of what you had was, remember, you had a Secret Service director that was willing to do an interview for television, but wasn't willing initially to answer member of Congress's questions. And then that's when she famously said, well, you know, we didn't have an agent up on the roof because the pitch of the roof, you know, it was to, I mean, it was a flat roof essentially. I was there.

The roofs that the snipers were on were more sloped than the roof that Crook was on. Exactly. Yeah. So she's misleading there. when they did have the hearing, I guess what bothered me is I think I, and I told James Comer this afterwards, I think I would have, I was right on the verge of if I was there holding her in contempt. You're under oath. You're there under subpoena. If you know the answer to the question, you'd answer it. It's not, well, I really don't want to tell you that. Imagine if our

judiciary worked like that. Imagine if all of Congress worked like that. Well, I'm only going to give you the answers that make me look good. That's not the way it works. folks, if you know the answer and you're not willing to tell it under oath under subpoena, you get held in contempt. That should be the consequence, but they didn't do that. Well, and it really makes you think about the structure of government we currently live under, right? We say that we live in a republic, but now we have federal agencies who should be under the purview of the president, who should be answer to the people's representatives in Congress, willfully not giving over information, doing this all the time. This is such a common tactic in Washington,

especially with the intelligence agencies or agencies that have intelligence functions, right? Are Republicans acting a little bit out of fear here? I know we think of the Secret Service as the bodyguard, but there is an intelligence aspect to the agency too. Are Republicans acting in fear of what the Secret Service might do? I don't know that it's fear. I mean, look, when I was the chairman, we had the number two person at Secret Service say, hey, it's time to even the playing field with Jason Chaffetz because I was asking tough questions, and they sent 42 agents to dive into my background to try to come up with something nefarious that I had done.

And the best that they could get was you once applied to be a Secret Service agent. Yeah, that's it. That's all they got. So I got the political enema. But it shows how they act and they're cavalier they were in their attitude. So Congress needs to, look, there's some serious players. Senator Johnson's very serious about this. Senator Grass. he's been a super start of this. I think James Comer and Jim Jordan do a wonderful job on this. I think the speaker needs to be pushed a little bit harder.

You know, you have to do this and is painful it is. But the problem is, you know, at the Heritage Foundation, there were some panels today that came out and talked about there was a review in 1995. There was one done, I think, in 2005. I did probably the most thorough one that was done

in 2015, and yet the same fundamental challenges that I talked about, recruitment, training, workload, technology, and communication. Those five issues continue to plague the agency, and they're understaffed by more than a thousand agents, and then we have another incident. When I did my investigation, 400 plus pages, you can find it on the internet, you're going to find that we looked at more than 150 security incidents. These happened regularly. at the time we were doing fence jumping and shots fired at President Biden's vice presidential home.

We had shots fired at the White House. Nobody caught. Nobody apprehended. Nobody identified. So these are problems that continue to plague the agency. Remember all the fence jumpers? I mean, that was an embarrassment, right? And so you have to hire and bring somebody in from the outside.

That was the number one recommendation by Jay Johnson, the Homeland Security Secretary. And guess what? That's not what Joe Biden did. Joe Biden hired somebody who had worked for his security detail. That's how we got Cheeto, Director Cheatel. I'm glad that you brought up the information warfare that the Secret Service engaged in when you were investigating it. A quote from the New York Times report back in 2015 from Assistant Director Edward Lowry said, he said in a message, some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out.

Yeah. I mean, what is that? Take us behind the curtain. And these agencies operate in this way all the time, highly territorial, secretive, subversive, even to the will of the people. Yeah, to put 42 agents to go out and find something in my background to try to embarrass a chairman because he's asking questions. You would think somebody would be held in consequence.

Nobody was fired. Nobody was let go. Some people got paid time off. I call that a vacation. That was not a serious, there were no serious consequences. And it's that combative. And they just fundamentally forget who they work for. They work for the people.

And members of Congress are representatives of the people. So it's an attitude adjustment that needs to happen. But they don't, particularly with the Secret Service, they want to be secret. They don't want anybody looking over their shoulder. And, you know, when you start to look at what was happening overseas on some of these trips and prostitutes and all that, I don't want to disparage all these people. But there were some really bad activities. going on and they should have been held accountable and should have been fired, but almost nobody

gets fired. And it's certainly in this case, a president is shot. They got a couple of people now that are on administrative work duties, but nobody's been fired yet. And it's been weeks and weeks. They know what happened at this point. And they are not being candid about what has happened. Yeah, we're stress testing the Secret Service right now. And that's a dangerous game to play. Speaker Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries have agreed to form a bipartisan task force. to lead the congressional investigation into what happened in Butler. They say it's going to have subpoena powers. But the old saying in Washington, which I know that you probably know is, if you want to do nothing, form a committee.

Yeah. Does that hold with this committee? Or are you optimistic about the revelations and recommendations that this committee can make? I'm skeptical in that I think it's going to come back to those same five buckets, hopefully with more specificity. But how could you not do it? In the other hand, I think you have to do it. I'm glad to see it bipartisan. When I did my report, it was very bipartisan.

So this is one area of Washington, D.C., where I think you can look legitimately and say, this has been a bipartisan effort. In fact, going back to the hearing with Director Cheadle, I actually thought that the Democrats asked in many ways better questions than the Republicans did. Well, that'll do it. Thank you, Jason, for coming on and shedding light on.

What is really going on behind the Secret Service and with this assassination? Got to get it right. We've got to get it right. We do. We have to get it right. And hopefully people will come back from vacation, rested, and ready to investigate. I guess that's our hope. Very good. Thanks for having. That'll do it for today's episode of the Daily Signal podcast. Make sure to check out the evening edition of the Daily Signal podcast, which brings you the top headlines of the day's news. Like, subscribe, and leave a five-star rating for the Daily Signal podcast wherever you're

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