U.S. Secret Service Faces Scrutiny for Potential Lapses Prior to Trump Attack
Nearly one week after a gunman opened fire on former U.S. President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, U.S. Secret Service officials are facing intense scrutiny for potential missteps that allowed the incident to occur in the first place.
“How did a man with a high-powered rifle get on an elevated platform 130 yards away from a former president and the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party?” asks Jonathan Wackrow, chief operating officer, global head of security, at Teneo Risk Advisory and former U.S. Secret Service special agent in the Presidential Protection Division. “It shouldn’t happen. Full stop. That needs to be the focus of the criticism.”
U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly A. Cheatle is scheduled to testify before Congress on Monday about the attack on Trump. In a statement, Cheatle said that the agency will cooperate with the many ongoing reviews of the agency’s actions—including by the Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general—that are separate from criminal investigations into the incident.
“The Secret Service is working with all involved federal, state, and local agencies to understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again,” Cheatle said of the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooting killed a rally attendee and wounded several others, including the former president. “We understand the importance of the independent review announced by President Biden yesterday and will participate fully. We will also work with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action.”
The Response
Wackrow, the former chair of the ASIS International Executive Protection Community Steering Committee and an active member in the community, told Security Management on Thursday evening that he thinks that the Secret Service agents on Trump’s detail responded appropriately after the gunman opened fire.
The agents surrounded their protectee—Trump—after he went down, placing themselves between him and the threat. “You’ve got to get yourself between the protectee and the threat to shield them—to take any additional inbound rounds,” Wackrow adds. “That is a core tenet of the Secret Service.”
While shielding Trump and taking cover behind ballistic barriers at the front of the stage, agents quickly checked him for additional signs of injury as counter assault team members moved into position. Once the agents had confirmed that the gunman was neutralized by counter sniper fire and that Trump was not critically injured, they began moving him across the stage and into an armored sports utility vehicle for transport to a hospital.
Within the executive protection community, however, people have critiqued the Secret Service’s response—claiming that the agents took too long to remove the former president from the rally stage, allowing him to pause with his face visible and raise his fist, and that he was not adequately shielded by the agents.
“Those agents did exactly what they needed to do in the moment to cover and evacuate the protectee,” Wackrow says. “I’m not going to criticize them because the reality is, when the bell rings, there aren’t a lot of people that are willing to put themselves between a threat and a protectee.
“In this instance, you saw that quick reaction that was based upon training tactics and experience to really protect the former president,” Wackrow adds. “I think they did a remarkable job concurrent with the threat identification and neutralization by the counter sniper team.”
Other executive protection practitioners that Security Management spoke with about the agents’ response agreed with Wackrow’s assessment. They have also pushed back on critiques that the female agents on the former president’s detail were not fit for duty or did not react appropriately.
“I think it’s sad that a situation like this highlights some of the institutional bias that is consistently underpinning the industry,” says Caleb Gilbert, president of executive protection firm White Glove Protection Group and a member of the ASIS International Executive Protection Community Steering Committee. “I’ve personally seen and know women in the protection industry that have mitigated real-world attacks on principals…they were small frame women who did an incredible job saving lives.”
Planning and Procedural Lapses
Jerry Heying, CPP, CEO at International Protection Group and the Executive Protection Institute, says the actions of the agents were “heroic” in the moment but the activities of the Secret Service in the lead-up to that moment should be assessed to prevent a similar situation from occurring again.
“Everything hinges on what happened before the shots,” Heying says. “How was the shooter able to get to his position and fire rounds? That’s what’s going to be looked at.”
For instance, new investigation details reveal that the Secret Service turned over security of the building that the gunman perched on to local authorities. But those same local partners told the agency that they did not have the resources to station a patrol vehicle or personnel on the exterior of the building. Other details from briefings to Congress show that security officials knew there was a suspicious person matching Crooks’ description outside the security perimeter for the rally, but communication issues limited the ability to coordinate efforts to find him before he was able to open fire.
Along with the outside reviews, the Secret Service will conduct a mission assurance review that will assess how the shooting happened and potential gaps and deficiencies in the security planning phases leading up to the event.
“Was this just the one moment in time where things went wrong? Or is there a systemic issue? Is there a bigger problem that the Secret Service must address in their protective model?” Wackrow asks.
The Secret Service is arguably one of the world’s premiere executive protection units. It has vast resources in the forms of funding, technology assets, law enforcement power, and human personnel to carry out its mission to protect the president, former presidents, and other high-profile U.S. public servants and their families. Agents undergo years of training to prepare to respond instantaneously to incidents like the one that unfolded on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Unlike most private sector executive protection companies, the Secret Service also has a large advance team that conducts risk assessments and manages planning for events that protectees appear at. Wackrow served as the presidential advance lead during his time with the Secret Service, working both domestically and internationally to establish security plans for small and large venues. This process typically begins months prior to an event day, with agents visiting the venue to build a security plan that uses concentric circles to mitigate threats—from firearms to drones to natural disasters to chemical, biological, and radiological dispersant—for as far as the eye can see.
“The protective methodology of the Secret Service is, in its simplest form, to provide protection to our protectee—in this case the former president—in all directions, at all times,” Wackrow says.
Standard mitigation measures might include implementing magnetometers for event attendees to go through before entering the security perimeter to ensure that no one brings in a weapon. To address outside the perimeter threats, security officials might manipulate the environment by placing buses, flags, or banners to remove the line of site that an attacker might have to the protectee.
“The challenging part is on the outside of that perimeter, and this is where a lot of focus on the investigation is going to be,” Wackrow says, adding that how the Secret Service prepared to mitigate threats from high ground, rooftops, and the treeline at the Butler rally will likely be assessed.
...when the bell rings, there aren’t a lot of people that are willing to put themselves between a threat and a protectee.
The Secret Service’s work requires partnership with local officials, who can provide threat intelligence on local crime and persons of interest that need to be addressed in the security preparations. The agency also often works with local security practitioners—both public and private sector—to support security planning and operations.
Heying himself has been part of these efforts, supporting the Secret Service’s work on approximately 100 separate occasions during his career. Most of these experiences were positive and relied on “professional trust,” he says. “The agents, they need our assistance on the private side when they come into a venue.”
This requires clear communication about the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the overall security plan so that pathways are in place to alert personnel to respond to potential threats.
“I think what we’re going to see in this instance is that roles and responsibilities on the front end probably weren’t fully vetted,” Wackrow adds. “Or the threat may not have been fully understood, and then there was a communication breakdown once the threat was identified.
“How do we make sure that everyone knows that there is a threat here?” Wackrow continues. “I mean, having awareness for almost 2 minutes and 14 seconds that there was a man with a gun pointed at the former president on a roof—that’s unacceptable.”
Gilbert says that as the reviews of the Secret Service and the investigations continue, they provide a learning opportunity for the executive protection community.
“This has been a peek inside the Secret Service we haven’t seen since the Reagan assassination attempt in the early ‘80s,” Gilbert explains. “The takeaways will have a ripple effect in the industry because the Secret Service posture that they had that day can be improved upon. The learning opportunities are phenomenal for us.”
Post-incident reviews are a regular practice of the executive protection industry that provide valuable insights on what went well and what needs improvement.
At Gilbert’s company, which provides embedded executive protection teams for corporations and high net worth individuals, teams conduct these reviews after all operations because threats to protectees continue to evolve.
“We have to adapt, and we have to increase our level of proficiency over time,” Gilbert explains. “Otherwise, the tactics that we used to maintain safety yesterday aren’t necessarily going to work in the future.”
There are some “tried and true” measures like concentric rings of security that provide protection up to a certain level, Gilbert adds. But those rings are only as strong as their weakest link, which could have devastating consequences like those seen on Saturday.
These reviews can also explain why agents may have responded to a threat in a way that did not align with expectations or procedures.
“We’re in the real world when we’re on an operation,” Gilbert says. “Sometimes, there are deviations from standards or protocols that are absolutely necessary. We need to empower the agents in the field to be able to flex but still have that structure so that we can provide that level of protection.”
Moving Forward
Kevin Palacios, CPP, PCI, PSP, chair of the ASIS International Executive Protection Community, says executive protection practitioners also need to assess their ability to address known threats and unknown threats—like that posed by lone actors who may not display traditional indicators that they are on the path to violence.
“We as an industry need to reflect on this case to improve our threat and vulnerability assessments to be more flexible to the concept that just like anyone can protect anyone, anyone can harm anyone,” Palacios says.
As investigators seek to determine the gunman’s motive, Wackrow says the limited information about his intentions so far shows the complexity that law enforcement and the private sector face when trying to conduct intelligence as part of their security planning.
“While we want to look for those directional indicators that are clear—those red flags that we can action off of quickly, regardless of private or public sector—they may not be available,” he explains. “That’s why you build out these sites into the world of possibility around those threats and vulnerabilities. That’s easy to say from a government standpoint. But it’s challenging for our members at ASIS who are in the private sector, who don’t have unlimited resources or the availability of the volume of resources that the Secret Service has.”
How was the shooter able to get to his position and fire rounds? That’s what’s going to be looked at.
Wackrow adds that its also important to address expectations on what will ultimately become known about the gunman’s motive in attacking Trump. People often want “instantaneous answers” about why the attacker acted the way they did and how they carried out their plan, Wackrow says. But sometimes, finding the answers to these questions takes weeks, if not years.
“We still don’t know what happened in the most horrific mass shooting event in U.S. history, which was Las Vegas,” Wackrow says. “We still don’t know. And we may never know.”
After Saturday’s attack, Trump and his campaign traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the Republican National Convention (RNC) where he was officially named the Republican Party nominee for president.
The RNC was a National Special Security Event (NSSE), which means security was coordinated by the Secret Service. Measures for the event were strengthened following Saturday’s shooting and Cheatle said that the agency also implemented changes to Trump’s security detail to ensure his continued protection during the remainder of the campaign. What these additional measures are remain unclear.
Trump, however, is expected to travel to another campaign rally tomorrow. The event was originally planned to be held outdoors but has since been moved inside a venue. The Washington Post reports that the campaign is not expected to do “outdoor rallies again for the foreseeable future.”
