On July 13, 2024, a bullet grazed the ear of former President Donald J. Trump in the briefest instant when he turned his head. But for that movement, it would have been a kill shot and a successful assassination. Another shot found Corey Comperatore, a gregarious longtime firefighter, at the event with his daughter and wife, in whose arms he died. Other shots seriously wounded two others in attendance.

The shooter was Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania, who was killed seconds later by a Secret Service sharpshooter. Crooks had been observed in and around the arena hours before the event and had even drawn the attention of local police. Later, he was seen by numerous attendees on top of the highest vantage roof point in the area, approximately 150 yards from the stage. His activity was so apparent it drew the attention of dozens of people, many of whom were filming his activity while others were yelling at the authorities about the man on the rooftop.

Here is where the wheels fall off the story. The Secret Service, FBI, and other agencies treat this investigation as a chore, not their responsibility to the nation’s citizens. Crooks walked into the election rally, evidently bypassing security, with a backpack, gun, explosives, and a rangefinder to measure the distance to his target. He had previously surveilled the area using a drone, again without being confronted. He had other explosives in his car – sophisticated enough to raise questions about where he learned to assemble them.

Yet, by evening, authorities had washed down Crooks’ rooftop sniper position, and seven days later, his body was cremated even as the investigation was ongoing, to the surprise of local officials. By the evening of July 13, the FBI had spent four hours in the Crooks home and announced that Crooks miraculously had no social media posts. They also got into Crooks’s phone that evening and stated that no useful information was obtained. (However, using geo-location technology and the number associated with Crooks and his home, various news sites tracked the phone’s location, pinging a half-dozen times in the immediate vicinity of the Gallery Place office complex in downtown Washington, D.C., where various agencies, including the FBI, have office space.)

It now seems there is a complete lack of curiosity about further investigation. The storm of controversy over the obviously subpar pre-event security and the event security itself is self-evident. We now learn that repeated requests from field agents to beef up the former president’s security were routinely denied in Washington, and whistleblowers within the Secret Service paint a picture of complete ineptitude at the highest levels. In Butler, Pennsylvania, the Secret Service was so strapped for personnel that a number of the officers on site were from the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation division. This was an assassination waiting to happen.

Monumental Failure

What is very clear is that this was a catastrophic failure, or worse, at every level – no other interpretation is available. Huge unanswered questions remain about the shooter’s contacts and travel before the Butler event: who paid for his equipment, and whether he had help maneuvering in and around the event grounds. The official storyline is simply a getaway vehicle used to flee from the terrible truth. The government and its agencies are complicit in inaction or direct action.

Recently, a second assassination attempt took place at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, after Trump decided to play golf with a friend on the 27-hole course. Even though the Secret Service only knew about the stop less than an hour beforehand, a crazed, well-known “activist” named Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, had staked out a position hidden in the scrubs near hole number five at the golf course for twelve hours. (Evidently, it is the only hole where golfers are visible, and the press uses it for photos.)

Routh was armed with an SKS-AK47 semi-automatic rifle fitted with a high-power scope, at least two digital cameras, and a food bag. Before Trump reached hole five, a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of Routh’s SKS pointing through the chain link fence and shrubs bordering the course and opened fire on him. Routh abandoned his position and escaped in a stolen car, which was reported to the sheriff’s department by a witness, and deputies captured him on a nearby highway.

Again, there are more questions than answers.

Where’d the Money Come From?

It turns out that Routh had a long, 74-count rap sheet, including felonies, yet never spent a day in jail and was able to pass a firearm background check and acquire the rifle. He was supposedly unemployed, yet was nation-hopping across the world’s hot spots while attempting to “recruit” militants or “terrorists” to fight primarily in Ukraine and reportedly had contacts inside the US government, including Congress.

Who paid for his extensive international travel, slick website, and ability to get documents and “visas” cleared for the “recruits”? Finally, why were tips to the FBI about his instability and reckless threats not followed up?

All we know for sure is that an alert agent saved the day in a muddled security mess. Where were the drone assets? Where was the preliminary search of the exposed hole five and the shrubbery along the fence? Was there a search for explosives?

As usual, there are no answers. What is being termed a “success” in thwarting the attempt is actually a complete failure of security – save for the lone, shape-eyed Secret Service agent.

Everything is always a tyranny of coincidences.

Rogue Agencies

It’s hard to overstate the arrogance and incompetence, at once, of the nation’s intelligence and enforcement agencies, including the enfeebled Secret Service. But the real story of the mess that country finds itself in goes back more than six decades, to the murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, President John F. Kennedy waves from his car in a motorcade in Dallas. Riding with Kennedy are First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, right, Nellie Connally, second from left, and her husband, Texas Gov. John Connally, far left. President Donald Trump, on Saturday, Oct. 21, 2017, says he plans to release thousands of never-seen government documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. (AP Photo/Jim Altgens, File)

Despite the release of 14,000 pages of documents related to the JFK assassination several years ago, 4,000 pages of documents deemed “too sensitive” for release remain embargoed. The reason seems self-evident. First, Lee Harvey Oswald was working with the CIA, and the remaining withheld documents detail the direct participation of the CIA (and then the FBI), including the falsification of documents presented to the Warren Commission (assigned to investigate the assassination), the convenient loss of evidence, and silencing contradictory testimony. Both CIA Director John McCone and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover actively hid evidence and manipulated facts presented to the Commission. Even the namesake of the report, Chief Justice Earl Warren, withheld critical information from the Commission, including access to the autopsy photographs, both of his own volition and at the request of the Kennedy family, with whom he was close friends.

But, withholding the 4,000 pages is too late; most Americans have already crossed the bridge to the worst-case scenario.

John Kennedy was the third president to realize it was imperative to reform or remake the CIA. Like the FBI, the CIA had become a self-regulating, free-wheeling agency that created, instead of implementing, policy for the US. For President Kennedy, this was borne out of the Bay of Pigs disaster, which he believed failed because the CIA and military leaders were both incompetent and had deliberately misled him.

While there’s no verifiable source for the quote attributed to President Kennedy that he would “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” there is ample evidence that the sentiment was accurate. Only days after the Bay of Pigs invasion, JFK reached out to several people, including his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who himself had left office expressing grave misgivings about the “military-industrial complex” and the corruption of scientific integrity.

Something Off

Meeting at Camp David on April 22, 1961, Kennedy, prodded by Eisenhower, explained that he had followed the advice of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the Cuba invasion. He then told “Ike” that he would be reshuffling the failed national security decision-making process to eliminate the CIA and military misdirection used to gain approval for the operation.

It’s not clear whether former President Harry S. Truman discussed the CIA and its expanding role in directing and stage-managing national security polic with JFK when he visited the White House in early 1961. Yet the suggestion is evident in a Washington Post editorial written by Truman only a month after JFK’s murder in Dallas. Truman, whose administration established the CIA in 1947, wrote that he saw “something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic positions, and I feel that we need to correct it.”

(The CIA attempted, through the intervention of John Foster Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired as head of the CIA, to get the former president to recant his article. When he wouldn’t, Dulles forged and circulated a letter from Truman stating that he had. Truman would say later in response, “I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in [1947] if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”)

After the serial revelations in Congress and the courts about the CIA and FBI spending the last eight years manipulating the previous two elections in an attempt to forestall or remove Trump, including wiretapping his campaign, promoting made-up dossiers, working directly with big tech and the legacy media to manipulate, cancel, lie, and stage-managing news and coups, is it hard to believe these agencies were involved overtly or covertly in attempts to remove another troublesome president who wants to shake up Washington?

Dismantle and Rebuild

The CIA and the larger intelligence community of 17 agencies, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other enforcement agencies, including Homeland Security’s HIS, have become too imperiously powerful and too bureaucratically clumsy at the same time – a dangerous combination.

Concurrently, the “temporary” Patriot Act hastily put together after 9/11(along with the assembly of the Department of Homeland Security) – continually renewed by a weak-kneed Congress, has become a permanent and radical expansion of criminal and intelligence (including electronic data collection on every American) overreach well outside the scope of our constitutional system.

The time has come to heed the wisdom and advice of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy and reform, retool, and remake the intelligence services, the CIA, the FBI, and other enforcement agencies to serve, not control, statecraft and public policy. We must protect the homeland and American interests here and abroad – not as these agencies please, but as established by elected representatives of a free and self-governing people.

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture, and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the US House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.