This is 2024. Opening fire on a former president should not be—as it was for Thomas Matthew Crooks—so easy.
After three bullets came within millimeters of killing 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally less than two weeks ago, the president’s Secret Service detail faces intense scrutiny over several nearly fatal security lapses.
On Thursday, Senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), revealing that a whistleblower claimed that the Secret Service declined to use drones at the event.
“According to one whistleblower,” he wrote, “the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service [USSS] repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally. This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the site. Secret Service said no. The whistleblower further alleges that after the shooting took place, USSS changed course and asked the local partner to deploy the drone technology to surveil the site in the aftermath of the attack.”
Earlier this week, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Trump’s shooter may have operated a drone in the area of his would-be assassination two hours before the shooting. Hawley pressed DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to explain why the president’s security detail turned down the opportunity to use similar technology.
“It is hard to understand why USSS would decline to use drones when they were offered, particularly given the fact USSS permitted the shooter to overfly the rally area with his own drone mere hours before [the] event,” he said. “The failure to deploy drone technology is all the more concerning since, according to the whistleblower, the drones USSS was offered had the capability not only to identify active shooters but also to help neutralize them.”
Hawley’s groundbreaking divulgence fittingly arrived less than a week before National Whistleblower Appreciation Day, which Congress recognizes as an opportunity to “make clear that government whistleblowers should feel empowered to disclose wrongdoing and be protected from retaliation when they do so.”
As the nation scrambles to get to the bottom of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we must hold the federal government accountable to the American people. Join us as we purge corruption from the corridors of power using the Founding Fathers’ cure for federal overreach: the Article V convention.
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Whistleblower exposes new Secret Service security failure
Published in Blog on July 26, 2024 by Jakob Fay
