The Larry C. Johnson’s Sonar 21 podcast interviewed on July 19 with former Secret Service agent J. Lawrence Cunningham to discuss security lapses in the July 13 attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Cunningham made clear that the Secret Service is responsible for all considerations of protection of a candidate. The preparation for protection starts long before an election cycle, in which agents are trained as a team, and each agent knows what the other agents are doing. State and local police are selected and pulled into these teams and undergo training with their counterparts at the Secret Service training facilities in Beltsville, Maryland.
According to Cunningham, on July 13, the inner perimeter team worked well, using the three basic rules: 1) alert the other team members of a threat (in this case a sniper shooting at the candidate); 2) shield the candidate, in which all agents surrounded the candidate with their bodies; and 3) evacuate the candidate to a secure area.
However, the outer perimeter teams underwent last-minute personnel changes, and there were multiple mistakes. There may have also been a shortage of trained manpower, since at the same time Jill Biden and Kamala Harris were in the area, and some of the agents originally assigned to the Trump event may have been reassigned to assist the other security deployments.
At 5:06 p.m., once they were notified that Thomas Matthew Crooks was acting suspiciously, immediately a roving team should have been dispatched to assess any threat. That never happened, and it seems that the command post did not order anyone to investigate the possible threat. A possible threat should be the highest priority for the command post. Meantime, the candidate should have been held in a secure location, as long as a possible threat was in the area. If an identified threat could not be removed, the event should have been canceled.
Cunningham says that standards have been lowered, even on issues of staff physical fitness, but he warns that there are adversaries who try to profile all the strengths and weaknesses of the Secret Service, making it a tragedy to allow standards to slip. Protection for an actual event starts days before the event, in which advance teams should know in detail the venue and identify possible vulnerabilities. Long before the event, that area should be secured, allowing no unauthorized people to wander into the area. During the event agents should mingle with the crowd in order to guarantee security in the area. A helicopter or at least a drone should have been flying in order to identify any problems and a person on a roof would have been easily spotted. However, teamwork and communications were so flawed, that even when a local cop climbed to the roof and saw the shooter, there was a moment of hesitation because it was not immediately clear if Thomas Matthew Crooks was part of the security detail or a potential threat.
Cunningham did not criticize any specific agent or police officer, inasmuch as it is the responsibility of the leadership to create the teamwork and communications that make everything run smoothly. He said that often there is tension between the field agents and their superiors, since those superiors often did not want to work in the field, spending cold nights or hot afternoons protecting the principal, but chose to be in a comfortable command post bossing around everyone else.
Both Johnson and Cunningham expressed they do not trust the FBI involvement in any investigation and Cunningham also questioned if an anti-Trump attitude allowed for a less robust commitment to security.
