Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), posted a private video to social media on July 14, in which he questions whether the Secret Service’s failure to protect former President Donald Trump from an assassination attempt on July 13 showed either “utter incompetence” or that the Secret Service were “complicit.” He states:
“I’ll make this real simple, up front. This assassination attempt on Donald Trump was made possible by one or two things, and there are only two possible explanations: either the Secret Service is utterly, totally incompetent, or they were complicit in letting this happen.
“Let me explain. When an event like this is held, the Secret Service sends out, they do a site survey. Where’s the venue, what are the parameters of who can get in? How’s access going to be controlled? What screening process are you going to do? And then, once you’ve secured that venue, and figured out all the entrances and exits, and how to cover those, and prevent anyone from getting in that shouldn’t be there, and to control access, you then do a sweep outside. And it depends upon the location, how far out you go, but ultimately, what you really want to do is identify potential spots where a shooter could potentially have, to shoot at the person they’re supposed to protect.”
Johnson emphasized, “And you know it’s real simple. You take the stage where Donald Trump was going to be standing, put someone about Trump’s height, have him stand there. Then put your personnel moving around, and even you could probably use drones now, to identify locations where there was a clear line of sight, which means you would have a clear line of fire at someone like Trump. Now, what most people don’t understand, is that yes, we have snipers, both in military Special Operations community, and the law enforcement community, who are trained to make long-distance shots. They can shoot up to a mile, two miles away. But that really requires both special ammunition and rifles, and some significant training to pull off that kind of shot.
“So, what you’re really looking at, from the standpoint of what the Secret Service had to do, was to sweep an area of about 300 yards circumference, around, I guess they call it, that Butler Farm, but to identify potential locations. The building on which this sniper, this shooter, was shot and killed, after he fired the shots, was unsecured. That is inexcusable. At a minimum, at a minimum, as a result of the initial site survey, there should have been personnel attached to the top of that structure.”
