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A gunman wouldn’t have been able to get so close if it were President Biden on the golf course this weekend instead of former President Donald Trump.
A second assassination attempt against Mr. Trump is raising more questions about the resources allocated to security for the former president and current presidential candidate, with much of the focus on why the Secret Service hasn’t done more.
Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said the golf course would have been far better protected for a sitting president.
“At this level that he is at right now, he’s not the sitting president. If it was, we would have had this entire golf course surrounded. But because he’s not, his security is limited to areas that the Secret Service deems possible,” Sheriff Bradshaw said.
Some members of Congress said that needs to change.
“It is inexplicable that this happened again,” Rep. Claudia Tenney, New York Republican, wrote on social media. “At this point, the threat level against President Trump requires the same, if not more Secret Service protection than a sitting President.”
Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House that the Secret Service needs more resources, “and I think Congress should respond to their need.”
Ron Rowe, acting director of the agency, has sounded conflicted. He has said the failures that led to the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump in July weren’t a result of a shortage of resources. The gunman killed one person and seriously wounded two others.
He has also said Congress must invest in his agency to ensure it can continue to meet the protection demands.
The gunman in Sunday’s incident did not get off a round. A Secret Service agent spotted a rifle poking through the bushes at the golf course and fired at the man, who fled and was later apprehended in an SUV heading north on Interstate 95.
Investigators, citing cellphone records, said the man was at the scene from about 2 a.m. to 1:31 p.m. when he was spotted and the agent shot at him. Mr. Trump was hundreds of yards away from the gunman.
The golf course is tough to secure, but Sheriff Bradshaw made clear the perimeter would have been further out if Mr. Trump were the sitting president.
SEE ALSO: Whistleblower: ‘Low-caliber agent’ led Trump security during rally assassination attempt
After the July attempt on Mr. Trump’s life, then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was prodded over why Mr. Trump received less protection than Mr. Biden.
She said the sitting president deserves better protection because of his role and concerns over “continuity of government.”
Mark Morgan, a former assistant director in the FBI who previously worked with the Secret Service on VIP protection, said Secret Service leadership views Mr. Trump as a standard “protectee” like most of the roughly three dozen other people it covers.
Mr. Morgan said Mr. Trump faces a unique set of dangers.
“The issue is that the Secret Service puts their protectees into categories and assigns resources based on that category,” he said. “In Trump’s case, that should all go out the window. He’s the GOP candidate for president, he’s already had one assassination attempt and Iran has plotted to kill him. It’s a fundamental flaw to put him in the protective category.”
Viewing Mr. Trump in the threat category could also solve the resource issue, said Mr. Morgan, who ran immigration agencies in the Trump administration and is now a fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
“This is a leadership issue, not a resource issue,” he said. “I promise you there is never a want for resources. If the Secret Service reaches out to a state or local police department for resources, they are met with a resounding, ‘Yes.’ But they never divorce themselves from the category-based model, and the threat is always viewed from the category.”
Robert McDonald, a former supervisory Secret Service agent who worked in the presidential protection division, called Mr. Trump “the perfect storm of protection.”
“The Secret Service has to come to the realization that former President Trump is not a former president like Clinton, Obama and Bush,” he said. “They are not as visible for the amount of time that he is, they are not candidates for office.”
Mr. McDonald, who now teaches at the University of New Haven, said the agency did improve its coverage of Mr. Trump after the July attempt.
He suggested the agency drop other parts of its work, such as pursuing bank fraud and counterfeiting, and focus solely on protection. He also said the Secret Service needs to improve its planning for its own needs.
“A lot of the budget is going toward the travel of agents who are going out to do protection,” said Mr. McDonald, who now teaches at the University of New Haven. “We put our budget together, but we don’t know how many foreign trips the president or vice president will take or what catastrophic events will happen. The amount of people we protect, the amount of trips we are taking has increased significantly versus 25 years ago. The Secret Service needs to do a good job of asking for what it needs.”
Even as the Sunday shooting garners attention, Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, released a report examining problems with the July attack based on whistleblower information.
Mr. Hawley said the lead agent in charge of the scene in Butler, Pennsylvania, was known to be a “low-caliber agent.” He said the Secret Service had no intelligence unit team deployed, which fueled poor communications among federal authorities and state and local law enforcement.
“The resulting findings are highly damaging to the credibility of the Secret Service and DHS. They reveal a compounding pattern of negligence, sloppiness, and gross incompetence that goes back years, all of which culminated in an assassination attempt that came inches from succeeding,” Mr. Hawley’s investigators said in their report.
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