While the law enforcement officers and Secret Service agents at Trump’s Butler, PA, rally responded quickly and definitively in the seconds after the near-miss assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, many argue that there should have been more done beforehand to prevent such an attack from ever occurring in the first place. Among those who thought as much was former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, who spoke about what he saw as security failures involved in creating a situation where the attempted assassin could open fire on Trump in the first place.

As background, shortly after the assassination attempt, Secret Service Communications Chief Anthony Guglielmi said, in a post on X, “Theres an untrue assertion that a member of the former President’s team requested additional security resources & that those were rebuffed. This is absolutely false. In fact, we added protective resources & technology & capabilities as part of the increased campaign travel tempo.”

In another post on much the same topic, Gugliemi said that no Secret Service resources were directed away from Trump for Jill Biden, saying, “We did not divert resources from FPOTUS Trump & protection models don’t work that way. As far as “field office teams” these are the candidate nominee operations teams that are added during election years for the heavy travel tempo.”

Bongino pushed back somewhat on Guglielmi’s claim that extra resources were deployed, telling Fox News Channel’s Pete Hegseth that he wants to know what extra resources were deployed and arguing that there are “open security questions” about the event and what happened that need to be answered, regardless of what Guglielmi is pushing.

“Open security questions right now, and this is why again I think the Secret Service, the PR, Anthony Guglielmi, has to be very careful about what they put out. You know, he says in his X post, and you can read it yourself, you don’t need to hear it from me, that they deployed these extra resources and technology. Okay, well which ones?” Bongino said.

“You’re telling me the best technology you have was deployed and you missed a shooter 130 yards? Say it was 200 yards. The Secret Service CS team, Pete, the counter-sniper team? . . . Either way, they’d still be briefed in. The question we have to ask is, if that’s the best technology we have, and we had a CS team up there with a shooter that, you know, we’re trained out to a thousand yards in the Secret Service with the counter-sniper team. How did they miss someone at most, you know, one-fifth of the way there? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Bongino also questioned what other resources were deployed to observe the rooftop, which the Secret Service has since said was identified ahead of time as a security threat. He asked, “And even worse, it’s broad daylight on a white roof. So again, open questions here. Was there forward-looking infrared deployed? Was there aerial support, drones, helicopters?”

And, noting how the Secret Service did well in immediately surrounding Trump, Bongino said, “I mean, the rule with the Secret Service is cover the protectee and evacuate. The other rule is maximum to the protectee, minimum to the problem. Why minimum to the problem? Because you don’t know that’s the only problem. It could be a distraction.” He continued, “There could be another person in the crowd. So if you don’t jump on the protectee, you could be looking at multiple shooters. So at least that part, the guys there, you know, stepped up there, but the failure here is absolutely catastrophic.”

Watch him here:

Featured image credit: By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55653121