Rancor, recriminations, and serious formal misconduct complaints have plagued all levels of the Secret Service detail assigned to protect former President Donald Trump over the last year, distracting the team from its core mission of securing Trump from physical harm and preventing an assassination.
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Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.
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Just days after Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe denied playing a direct role in rejecting repeated requests for added security measures and assets for former President Trump, whistleblowers have come forward refuting those claims and blaming Rowe for some of the agency’s security failures that led to the July 13 assassination attempt that nearly killed Trump and left rallygoer Corey Comperatore dead and two others wounded.
Other whistleblowers are coming forward citing more systemic problems with the Secret Service, the vaunted agency whose primary job is to protect presidents, vice presidents and former presidents and their families.
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Few Americans trust the United States Secret Service to keep presidential candidates safe before the November election, according to a Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Friday.
Only about three out of ten Americans say they are “extremely” or “very confident” that “the Secret Service can keep presidential candidates safe from violence before the election,” according to the AP-NORC poll. U.S Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her position on July 23 following an evasive testimony before Congress about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
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Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
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Eight members of the Tennessee congressional delegation reacted to U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s resignation on Tuesday, agreeing that her decision to step down was in the agency’s best interest.
Cheatle’s resignation came 10 days after former President Donald Trump was grazed by a single bullet in his upper right ear in what is formally being investigated as a failed assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
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Police bodycam released by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Tuesday shows Beaver County, Pennsylvania police officers tell a U.S. Secret Service agent a Butler County Police Department (BCPD) sniper was perched with a direct line-of-sight view of Thomas Michael Crooks as the 20-year-old attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump on July 13.
According to Grassley, the dialogue confirms the sniper, identified as Greg in the video, captured photographs of the shooter and shared them with Secret Service, and was tracking him visually but lost sight prior to the shooting.
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While Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle frustrated lawmakers Monday with sparse details about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the FBI has disclosed to Congress that the shooter used three encrypted communications apps ostensibly tied to Germany, Brussels and New Zealand and also possessed an arrest photo of an earlier Michigan school shooter, Just the News has confirmed.
In multiple briefings, FBI leaders told lawmakers that the 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’ primary cell phone has become an important focal point of the probe, including some 14,000 images that were found on it, according to multiple sources familiar with the briefings. The FBI has not issued an update on their findings to the public since July 14.
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U.S. Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle resigned from her position on Tuesday following backlash she received after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
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In a testy hearing before of the House Oversight Committee on Monday, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN-02) slammed U.S. Secret Service (USSS) Director Kimberly Cheatle after the near assassination of former President Donald Trump on her watch.
On July 14, Trump was hosting a campaign rally in Butler, PA, when shots rang out from a nearby rooftop, with only bullet grazing Trump’s ear and narrowly missing his head.
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) defended her call for both President Joe Biden and U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign from their posts during an exclusive interview with The Tennessee Star’s CEO and Editor-In-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy on Monday.
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Chairman James Comer and Ranking Member Jamie Raskin issued a joint statement calling for U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign after her evasive testimony during a hearing on Monday.
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Three separate House hearings this week on the security failures surrounding the attempted assassination of GOP nominee Donald Trump put the Secret Service and the FBI in the spotlight as questions still remain unanswered.
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Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) claimed on Saturday that the U.S. Secret Service did not attend a law enforcement meeting in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, the date former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks at a campaign rally.
Johnson told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that his team learned the apparent lack of attendance by the Secret Service from local law enforcement.
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The Secret Service confirmed Friday agency Director Kimberly Cheatle will testify as planned at a July 22 House Oversight Committee hearing about the assassination attempt on GOP nominee Donald Trump.
The committee is investigating the security lapses at former President Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania last weekend where a gunman opened fire, killing one and wounding three others, including the former president himself.
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Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) revealed on Friday that U.S. Secret Service whistleblowers approached his office to inform him the agency assigned Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel who were not part of the Secret Service to protect former President Donald Trump during the Pennsylvania rally where he suffered an assassination attempt.
In addition to the claim about questionable staffing, Hawley wrote in his Friday letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that whistleblowers with “direct knowledge of the event” told his office the agency also treated Trump’s rally as “loose” security.
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For over a half century the proponents of DEI and its intellectual precursors have fought from high ground, not from a moral position, but a tactical and strategic one secured by Marxist indoctrination that has pervaded nearly every corner of society.
The deliberate and methodical campaign has successfully muted public criticism, although privately most Americans felt that there is something terribly wrong with a philosophy that prioritizes appearance over ability. DEI’s commanding role in all branches of the military has resulted in no tangible benefits but a myriad of failures—falling morale and standards, recruitment shortfalls, plummeting public confidence in the military, poor leadership, and with the exception of the Marine Corps, the inability to fulfill basic mission requirements at an acceptable level.
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Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper during his failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last Saturday, was reportedly diagnosed with major depressive disorder prior to his death.
It was also reported that Thomas Matthew Crooks foreshadowed his attack, which claimed the life Trump supporter Corey Comperatore and injured two others in addition to piercing the former president’s right ear, on the popular video game storefront and platform Steam.
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Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and John Barrasso (R-WY) on Wednesday confronted U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on the floor of the Republican National Convention (RNC) over the Secret Service actions that preceded the Saturday assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
The Tennessee Star confirmed the confrontation happened at the Fiserv Forum in Mulwaukee, Wisconsin where the RNC is being held. Blackburn and Barrasso confronted Cheatle upstairs in a luxury suite just prior to 9 p.m., just minutes before Blackburn uploaded video to the social media platform X with the caption, “[t]he American people deserve answers from the Secret Service.”
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A source familiar with the conversation confirmed to The Tennessee Star that multiple members of the U.S. Senate were prohibited from asking questions during a Wednesday conference call with the U.S. Secret Service in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
The allegation surfaced after U.S. Senator Mike Lee revealed the Secret Service was “briefing senators” about the attempted assassination “on a conference call,” during which he claimed the federal agency provided “details that aren’t all helpful” and little information about “the failures that led to this tragedy.”
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The U.S. Secret Service last Saturday “created the conditions” for 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks to climb onto the roof of a building and take aim at former President Donald Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania rally “deliberately and with malice aforethought,” argued The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis, who led a series of criticisms against the agency on Tuesday.
Davis wrote in a Tuesday post to the social media platform X that the “security regime” created by President Joe Biden “deliberately and with malice aforethought created the conditions that led to an assassin shooting Donald Trump in the head.”
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House Republican members on the Oversight Committee said Tuesday the Department of Homeland Security has taken over communications between the committee and the U.S. Secret Service and refuses to confirm a time for a briefing that was supposed to take place today.
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Addressing the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said the “buck stops with me” but refused to resign.
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Embattled U.S. Secret Service Chief Kimberly Cheatle said Tuesday that the reason there were no agents stationed on top of the building the gunman used to carry out his assassination attempt on Donald Trump is because the building’s slightly sloped roof was deemed unsafe for agents to navigate.
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Inflexible Secret Service protocols, overworked special agents, and a decision against deploying more counter snipers to President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania all contributed to creating the opening for a gunman to wound Trump, kill a bystander, and seriously injure two others, according to several sources in the Secret Service community.
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A spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service on Sunday appeared to blame the Butler Township Police Department (BTPD) for failing to secure the building that would-be assassin Thomas Crooks used to shoot former President Donald Trump before Crooks was killed at the rally on Saturday.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Gugliemi claimed the agency was not responsible for securing the building, according to The New York Times, which reported it “was outside of the designated perimeter of the Trump rally, so it was secured by local law enforcement, not Secret Service agents.”
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Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said in a statement released on Monday that her agency will fully participate in the “independent review” President Biden ordered of security surrounding former President Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa. where he was shot.
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