The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General has said it has opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security at the Pennsylvania rally where the attempted assassination of Donald Trump occurred on Saturday.
On Wednesday, a brief notice from the Office announced it would be looking into “Secret Service’s process for securing former president Trump’s July 13, 2024 event.” The announcement did not provide further details.
The decision follows several other calls for investigation into how the shooter was able to get to the roof of a building so close to the stage where Trump was speaking, and with a clear line of site to the former president. On Sunday, ahead of his live television address to the nation, U.S. President Joe Biden said he had already ordered an independent review of how security was handled at the rally.
And on Monday, leaders of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee announced their own bipartisan investigation into the shooting, paralleling yet another by the Secret Service.
Senators Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, and Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said in a letter to Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, that they wanted to know “how the suspect was able to get this close to a Secret Service protectee.”
They added that they were interested in whether Trump’s security team had made any “additional security requests” as far back as November of 2022. They requested a briefing no later than July 25, and an appearance before the Governmental Affairs Committee by Aug. 1.
Speaking on CNN on Monday, Mayorkas said he had full confidence in the leadership of the Secret Service, but that the shooting amounted to a failure.
“When I say that something like this cannot happen, we are speaking of a failure,” he said. “We are going to analyze, through an independent review, how that occurred, why it occurred, and make recommendations and findings to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Nathan Steadman, a witness to the shooting, told the New York Times on Monday that he had been allowed to walk into the same area as the warehouse without a security check, and that he and his daughter then stood under a nearby tree, where they had a clear view of Trump.
He was surprised he had been allowed to get so close. “We never should have been allowed to go where we were,” he said. “Why that building was not secured, it makes no sense.
It is still not clear when and how the gunman got on the roof of the warehouse.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told the Times that local law enforcement was in contact by radio with the agency before the shooting, including with warnings from passers-by.
“There were radio communications between the Secret Service and local authorities acknowledging that the local police were dealing with an incident, an issue of a suspicious person,” he said.
Meanwhile, CNN is reporting the Secret Service “at odds with its local enforcement allies.”
Quoting an interview given by Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to ABC News on Monday, they noted that Cheatle had said local law enforcement was inside the building at the time of the shooting, and that it was their role to secure it.
“There was local police in that building – there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building,” Cheatle said.
But Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents more than 1,200 officers and agents of the Secret Service, took exception to any suggestion that local law enforcement was to blame.
“There is going to be an erosion of this trust caused by the Secret Service’s injudicious statements,” he told CNN on Monday. “This is kind of a betrayal by leadership of the Secret Service of the brave men and women who go out there and do an extraordinarily great professional jobs every day.”
He also took issue with the length of time Cheatle took to respond to questions about the shooting. When she told ABC News during her first public remarks on Monday: “The buck stops with me,” Pasco responded through CNN: “Apparently it took two days for the buck to stop.”
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