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‘Fingers Being Pointed’: Secret Service’s Explanations For Security Failures Ahead Of Trump Assassination Attempt Aren’t Adding Up

Published

7 months ago

12 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By KATELYNN RICHARDSON

 

Secret Service’s explanations for the security failures surrounding the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a rally on Saturday aren’t adding up, according to security experts and former Secret Service agents.

Emerging details highlight what seems to be a disconnect between local officials and Secret Service, while making it more apparent that there were major oversights. Many key questions hinge on the responsibilities delegated to local police, who U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle confirmed during a Monday interview with ABC News were inside the building the shooter fired from, though nobody was stationed on the rooftop.

Cheatle explained a decision was made not to put anybody on top of the building because the “sloped” roof made it unsafe, but security experts and former Secret Service agents who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation emphasized not having someone on the roof was a “big failure” and didn’t believe Cheatle’s explanation was sufficient.

“Let’s just say the local law enforcement officers [and] the Secret Service agree that it’s just not safe to keep someone up there for a couple of hours,” former Secret Service agent Anthony Cangelosi told the DCNF. “Then the question is, well, how do we maintain its integrity otherwise? It’s not like you just throw your hands up and say ‘can’t do that.’”

Cangelosi said there is no “justifiable reason” for failing to cover the roof, suggesting they should have found solutions like putting another platform up or getting an officer on a lift.

Peter Yachmetz, retired FBI agent and principal security consultant at Yachmetz Consulting Group, pointed out that the shooter was moving around on the “unsafe” roof prior to the incident.

“The slope didn’t affect him,” Yachmetz told the DCNF.

Law enforcement reportedly spotted the shooter on the roof 30 minutes before shots were fired, WPXI reported Monday. After the incident, a witness described watching a man climbing onto the roof and trying to warn a police officer, claiming officials responded with confusion.

“The reality is, regardless of the spin, that particular roof should have been under constant surveillance and or posted,” former secret service agent Tim Miller told the DCNF.

 

“In this particular instance, we did share support for that particular site and that the Secret Service was responsible for the inner perimeter,” Cheatle told ABC News Monday during an interview. “And then we sought assistance from our local counterparts for the outer perimeter. There was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.”

However, a local law enforcement official told The New York Times Tuesday that the local forces were in an adjacent building, not the one the shooter was firing from.

The discrepancies in their accounts only add to the uncertainties surrounding who was responsible.

CBS News reported Monday that there were three snipers stationed inside the building shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks fired from, citing a local law enforcement officer. One of the snipers saw Crooks looking through a rangefinder in the minutes before he fired and radioed command post, according to CBS News.

The Butler Township Police Department declined to confirm the report to the DCNF, stating that there is an ongoing investigation by the FBI.

Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe declined to offer additional comments Tuesday, telling the DCNF he is “backing away from media requests for comment and opinions.”

“There are too many questions being posed that I do not have first hand knowledge of and too many fingers being pointed,” he said. “I am in charge of the Deputy Sheriffs and no other law enforcement agency. My Deputies performed their duties at their assigned areas and went above and beyond after the shooting started and ended in the their actions to help people and assist police in clearing the nearby buildings.”

Slupe previously confirmed to CNN that an armed Butler Township officer encountered Crooks before he shot at Trump, but retreated down the ladder after Crooks pointed his gun at him. He told KDKA-TV there was a security failure, but noted “there is not just one entity responsible.”

“The Secret Service plays a key role in protecting, in this case, former President Trump, but they don’t act alone,” he told the outlet. “The Secret Service receives support from local police departments.”

Pennsylvania State Police, however, did confirm they had no members “inside the building or staging in it.”

“The Pennsylvania State Police provided all resources that the United States Secret Service (USSS) requested for former President Trump’s rally in Butler on Saturday, July 13th, including approximately 30 to 40 troopers to assist with securing the inside perimeter,” Pennsylvania State Police Lieutenant Adam Reed told the DCNF. “Among PSP’s duties at the rally, the Department was not responsible for securing the building or property at AGR International.”

Reed said he could not say when an officer witnessed the shooter, as it was not a state trooper who saw him.

 

Former secret service agent Jeffrey James explained to the DCNF that protection “works in a series of concentric circles.” Typically, there is an inner circle of secret service agents, a second circle that mixes both agents and local law enforcement, and an outer ring that is largely state and local partners.

If the agent in charge of the site told a local law enforcement officer on the outer perimeter that the building is his responsibility, then anything that happens is on the officer.

“But if that agent didn’t find one of the local law enforcement partners and give very clear, direct directions…then it’s going to be the responsibility or the fault of that agent for not delegating that,” he told the DCNF.

It’s unclear what instructions the Secret Service gave to local law enforcement.

Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger told The Washington Post Tuesday that “Secret Service was in charge” and that “it was their responsibility to make sure that the venue and the surrounding area was secure.”

“For them to blame local law enforcement is them passing the blame when they hold the blame, in my opinion,” Goldinger told The Washington Post.

However, the Secret Service released a statement on Tuesday pushing back against assertions that they were blaming local law enforcement for the tragedy that unfolded on Saturday. “Any news suggesting the Secret Service is blaming local law enforcement for Saturday’s incident is simply not true,” the statement posted to the Secret Service’s X page said.

“I am having difficulty reconciling the answer the Director gave in her ABC interview with the official statement made on social media,” Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said in a press release on Tuesday. “Our goal is to provide whatever assistance the Secret Service needs to perform their mission and to do so with mutual respect, trust, and accuracy.”

A RealClearPolitics report suggested Sunday that resources were diverted away from Trump’s rally to an event where First Lady Jill Biden was speaking. Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the United States Secret Service, denied this was the case.

Questions also remain about why Crooks was not taken out sooner. Cangelosi explained to the DCNF that counter-snipers can face challenges due to their distance from the target.

“With counter snipers, you’re usually so far away, it’s not usually clear whether an individual is an imminent threat, ” Cangelosi said. “It’s harder to discern. Once they discern whether that person is a threat to life or serious bodily injury, they can take the shot.”

Yachmetz questioned why drone coverage was not utilized.

“A drone strategically placed a few thousand feet above could have oversaw the entire venue,” he said.

“In my opinion, a detailed, in-depth very specific investigation must be conducted of all procedures [and] this entire matter by a non-biased outside investigative group (possibly of retired agents),” Yachmetz told the DCNF, emphasizing the investigation must not be “politically motivated.”

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer announced Monday that Cheatle would testify at a committee hearing on July 22. President Joe Biden said Sunday that he directed an “independent review” of the events.

The FBI told the DCNF it has “nothing additional to provide at this time beyond previously-issued statements.” The Bureau said Monday that it gained access to Crooks’ phone and “has conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses.”

Trump suffered a wound to his ear, and two were killed, including Crooks and 50-year-old ex-volunteer fire chief, Corey Comperatore. Two other attendees were also wounded the attack.

Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment.

Wallace White and Owen Klinsky contributed to this report.

Featured image credit: (Screen Capture/CSPAN)

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Energy

Trump’s Administration Can Supercharge America’s Energy Comeback Even Further

Published on January 28, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Curtis Schube

One of the first executive orders President Trump issued was “Unleashing American Energy.”

It begins an effort to undo the harm caused by the Biden administration’s unprecedented assault on the American energy sector. It overturns President Biden’s own destructive executive orders, including those canceling oil leases and prioritizing environmental regulations over the good of the economy and producing reliable energy.

It also orders that unduly burdensome energy regulations be rescinded. Trump’s EO forthrightly states that its goal is to encourage energy production “to meet the needs of our citizens and solidify the United States as a global energy leader.”

This executive order takes the nation in a whole new direction. It orders the agencies to audit their policies to weed out burdensome regulations that impact energy development. It terminates the infamous Green New Deal. It prioritizes employment and economic impacts in energy policy. It also revokes a Jimmy Carter Executive Order to reduce the burden on environmental studies that notoriously hold up energy projects.

One reform that met less pomp and circumstance, but is not lacking in impact, is permitting reform. President Trump’s Order instructs agencies to “eliminate all delays within their respective permitting processes including … the use of general permitting and permit by rule.”

This type of permitting reform should impact all American lives for the better. We all know how difficult permits can be to obtain, even if on a smaller scale than energy. When making an addition to a house, for example, one must submit it to government and pray that everything is correct.

Then, the waiting game begins as the government reviews the application, requires possible alterations at the its whim, then, eventually at some point, the project can move forward. It can be expensive and time consuming, and sometimes may deter people from even trying.

The same applies on a larger scale. Permits for major projects, like an oil well, can take years, even a decade or longer, to jump through all of the hoops. And, as the federal government is the gatekeeper to many different varieties of activities that require a permit, whoever is in charge of the executive branch can cripple a project.

Permits by rule and  general permits simplify the process drastically and ease the burden on both the applicant and the government. They are simple and predictable. For both types of permits, the government will first pre-determine the required criteria for someone to meet before the permitted conduct can commence. The government will promulgate the standards for all to see and know.

The applicant, knowing exactly what is required to perform the permitted conduct, can get a project moving quickly. For a general permit, no contact with the government is even needed. A permittee can begin a project so long as it satisfies the pre-set standards.

For a permit by rule, the applicant simply has to certify to the government, in writing, that all the criteria have been met. In response, the government can only check to see if the correct certifications are made and then either approve it or return the certifications with an explanation of which ones are not met. This is done in a short period of time, such as 30 days.

In both cases, the government has no discretion on a case-by-case basis. Instead of focusing its efforts as a gatekeeper for permits, the government will only focus on permittees who have not met the criteria, but after the permittee has begun its project. The government’s role is focused on enforcement actions.

Both sides benefit from this system. For those who behave correctly, the permitting process does not hold up projects. For the government, the resource drain for overseeing permitting is drastically reduced. The government only has to focus its attention on the minority of parties.

This system also has a built-in deterrent. If a permittee were to begin a project, only to have the government shut the project down at a later time through an enforcement action, the permittee would lose a significant investment.

The true benefit is to the American people. If energy companies can have a quick and expedited form of permitting, then the supply of energy can expand quicker. This makes the cost of energy, and all products, cheaper. In the wake of natural disasters, rebuilding can happen quicker. Infrastructure can be put in place faster. The benefits go on and on.

Permitting reform, such as that referenced in President Trump’s Executive Order, is a fantastic first step toward a more efficient government. His agencies should take full advantage and convert as many permits as possible to a permit by rule or general permit as soon as possible.

Curtis Schube is the Executive Director for Council to Modernize Governance, a think tank committed to making the administration of government more efficient, representative, and restrained. He is formerly a constitutional and administrative law attorney.

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Artificial Intelligence

Everyone is freaking out over DeepSeek. Here’s why

Published on January 28, 2025

By

From The Deep View

$600 billion collapse

Volatility is kind of a given when it comes to Wall Street’s tech sector. It doesn’t take much to send things soaring; it likewise doesn’t take much to set off a downward spiral.
After months of soaring, Monday marked the possible beginning of a spiral, and a Chinese company seems to be at the center of it.
Alright, what’s going on: A week ago, Chinese tech firm DeepSeek launched R1, a so-called reasoning model, that, according to DeepSeek, has reached technical parity with OpenAI’s o1 across a few benchmarks. But, unlike its American competition, DeepSeek open-sourced R1 under an MIT license, making it significantly cheaper and more accessible than any of the closed models coming from U.S. tech giants.
  • But the real punchline here doesn’t have to do with R1 at all, but with a previous language model — called V3 — that DeepSeek released in December. DeepSeek was reportedly able to train V3 using a small collection of older Nvidia chips (about 2,000 H800s) at a cost of about $5.6 million.
  • Still, training is only one cost of many tied to AI development/deployment; while the costs associated with researching, developing, training and operating both R1 and V3 remain either unknown or unconfirmed, DeepSeek’s apparent ability to reach technical parity at a far reduced cost, without state-of-the-art GPU chips or massive GPU clusters, has a lot of implications for America’s now tenuous position in AI leadership. (Though DeepSeek says it is open-sourced, the company did not release its training data).
Since the release of R1, DeepSeek has become the top free app in Apple’s App Store, bumping ChatGPT to the number two slot. In the midst of its spiking popularity, DeepSeek restricted new sign-ups due to large-scale cyberattacks against its servers. And, as Salesforce Chief Marc Benioff noted, “no Nvidia supercomputers or $100M needed,” a point that the market heard loud and clear. 
What happened: Led by Nvidia, a series of tech and chip stocks, in addition to the three major stock indices, fell hard in pre-market trading early Monday morning. All told, $1.1 trillion of U.S. market cap was erased within a half hour of the opening bell.
  • Performance didn’t get better throughout the day. Nvidia closed Monday down 17%, erasing some $600 billion in market capitalization, a Wall Street record. TSMC was down 14%, Arm was down 11%, Broadcom was down 17%, Google was down 4% and Microsoft was down 2%. The S&P fell 1.4% and the Nasdaq fell 3.3%. An Nvidia spokesperson called R1 an “excellent AI advancement.”
  • This is all going into a week of Big Tech earnings, where Microsoft and Meta will be held to account for the billions of dollars ($80 billion and $65 billion, respectively) they plan to spend on AI infrastructure in 2025, a cost that Wall Street no longer seems to feel quite so good about.
It’s hard to miss the political tensions underlying all of this. The tail end of former President Joe Biden’s time in office was marked in part by an increasingly tense trade war with China, wherein both countries issued bans on the export of materials needed to build advanced AI chips. And with President Trump hell-bent on maintaining American leadership in AI, and despite the chip restrictions that are in place, Chinese companies seem to be turning hardware challenges into a motivation for innovation that challenges the American lead, something they seem keen to drive home.
R1, for instance, was announced at around the same time as OpenAI’s $500 billion Project Stargate, two impactfully divergent approaches.
What’s happening here is that the market has finally come around to the idea that maybe the cost of AI development (hundreds of billions of dollars annually) is too high, a recognition “that the winners in AI will be the most innovative companies, not just those with the most GPUs,” according to Writer CTA Waseem Alshikh. “Brute-forcing AI with GPUs is no longer a viable strategy.”
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, however, thinks this is just a good time to buy into Nvidia — Nvidia and the rest are building infrastructure that, he argues, China will not be able to compete with in the long run. “Launching a competitive LLM model for consumer use cases is one thing,” Ives wrote. “Launching broader AI infrastructure is a whole other ballgame.”
“I view cost reduction as a good thing. I’m of the belief that if you’re freeing up compute capacity, it likely gets absorbed — we’re going to need innovations like this,” Bernstein semiconductor analyst Stacy Rasgon told Yahoo Finance. “I understand why all the panic is going on. I don’t think DeepSeek is doomsday for AI infrastructure.”
Somewhat relatedly, Perplexity has already added DeepSeek’s R1 model to its AI search engine. And DeepSeek on Monday launched another model, one capable of competitive image generation.
Last week, I said that R1 should be enough to make OpenAI a little nervous. This anxiety spread way quicker than I anticipated; DeepSeek spent Monday dominating headlines at every publication I came across, setting off a debate and panic that has spread far beyond the tech and AI community.
Some are concerned about the national security implications of China’s AI capabilities. Some are concerned about the AI trade. Granted, there are more unknowns here than knowns; we do not know the details of DeepSeek’s costs or technical setup (and the costs are likely way higher than they seem). But this does read like a turning point in the AI race.
In January, we talked about reversion to the mean. Right now, it’s too early to tell how long-term the market impacts of DeepSeek will be. But, if Nvidia and the rest fall hard and stay down — or drop lower — through earnings season, one might argue that the bubble has begun to burst. As a part of this, watch model pricing closely; OpenAI may well be forced to bring down the costs of its models to remain competitive.
At the very least, DeepSeek appears to be evidence that scaling is one, not a law, and two, not the only (or best) way to develop more advanced AI models, something that rains heavily on OpenAI and co.’s parade since it runs contrary to everything OpenAI’s been saying for months. Funnily, it actually seems like good news for the science of AI, possibly lighting a path toward systems that are less resource-intensive (which is much needed!)
It’s yet another example of the science and the business of AI not being on the same page.
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