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Former Secret Service agents describe ‘apocalyptic security failure’ at Trump event
Police vehicles near the site of the Butler, Pa., venue where President Donald Trump was speaking when he was struck in the ear by a bullet in an assassination attempt
From The Center Square
Former U.S. Secret Service agents and security experts argue the Secret Service’s failure to prevent an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on Saturday was “apocalyptic,” exhibiting a “massive security breach.”
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, has called for a congressional investigation. Multiple members of Congress are asking how a shooter ever reached a rooftop of a building to fire a shot at Trump, including U.S. Rep. Cory Mills, R-Florida, an Army veteran and counter sniper for the State Department who coordinated protective details for then Vice President Joe Biden, Condoleezza Rice and First Lady Laura Bush.
The assassination attempt on Trump was “a massive security breach,” Mills told CNN. The distance between the shooter and Trump was roughly 400 to 500 feet, “which is nothing for a shot adjacent to the stage of the president,” he said. “There was no one on that building, … in the building, standing next to the building to ensure there’s no access to the building,” he said. If there were, they “could have prevented this shooting.”
In an interview with Fox News, Mills said that the shots fired were the kind that soldiers learn in basic training boot camp and are “requested to make within nine weeks. This is one of the easiest shots.”
He said his job at the State Department involved working with an advanced team to establish a perimeter and “identify areas of threat that you would be able to mitigate … whether it be a building, … a lone tree … a parking lot. … Bottom line is this is massive negligence.”
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi has said agents responded quickly and the agency “added protective resources and technology and capabilities as part of [Trump’s] increased campaign travel.”
Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino questioned this claim, asking on Fox News, “Which ones? You’re telling me the best technology you have was deployed and you missed a shooter 130 yards away … and even worse, it’s broad daylight on a white roof.”
He asked if there was forward-looking infrared deployed and if there was aerial support like drones and helicopters.
Bongino also pointed out that Trump “knew to duck … and saved his own life. That’s just a fact. The evacuation did not go right. The rule with the Secret Service is ‘cover the protectee’ and evacuate. The other rule is ‘maximum to the protectee, minimum to the problem. … Because you don’t know that’s the only problem. It could be a distraction. There could be another person in the crowd … you could be looking at multiple shooters.”
“The failure here is absolutely catastrophic,” he said, calling on Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle to resign immediately. He said Secret Service “absolutely resolutely 100% failed. This was an apocalyptic security failure. … An uneventful failure is never a success. The fact that Donald Trump didn’t die … is no reason for anybody to take some kind of victory lap.”
Former Secret Service agent Jeff James agreed, telling WTAE ABC News the agents on the stage should have moved Trump off sooner because the first shots fired “may have been the precursor in the real attack. There may have been four more gunmen who were going to start opening fire. I would have rather seen him get him into the armored cars and get him out of there more quickly.”
Bill Pickle, a former deputy assistant Secret Service director, told the Wall Street Journal, “The reality is there’s just no excuse for the Secret Service to be unable to provide sufficient resources to cover an open rooftop 100 yards away from the site. And there’s no way he should’ve got those shots off.”
Retired Secret Service agent Donald Mihalek called the failed assassination attempt “historic, drawing parallels to the 1912 shooting of Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee,” the Journal reported. “Roosevelt, then a former president who was running for a third term in the White House, was shot while heading to a campaign event. He survived the attempt on his life.”
Erik Prince, who previously provided diplomatic security services, said, “unaccountable bloated bureaucracies continue to fail us as Americans. Donald J. Trump is alive today solely due to a bad wind estimate by an evil would be assassin.”
Prince analyzed the wind at the time of the shot, arguing it was enough to displace the bullet two inches from Trump’s “intended forehead to his ear. DJT [Trump] was not saved by USSS [U.S. Secret Service] brilliance. The fact that USSS allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yards to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.
“Clearly there was adequate uncontrolled dead space for a shooter to move into position and take multiple aimed shots,” he said, adding that one counter sniper “was clearly overwhelmed as his face came off his rifle instead of doing his job to kill the shooter.”
A counter sniper killed the alleged shooter after he shot several rounds, wounding Trump, killing one, and critically wounding two others.
“In my old business of providing Diplomatic Security in two active war zones we were expected to execute the basics, or we would be fired,” Prince said. “Clearly USSS failed at the basics of a secure perimeter and once shots were fired, their extraction was clumsy and left DJT highly exposed to follow on attacks.”
He also expressed no confidence in anyone being held accountable, saying, “That’s not the Washington way. Unserious and unworthy people in positions of authority got us to this near disaster.”
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
All eyes will be on the Supreme Court later this week when the justices conference on Friday to decide whether to grant a petition for writ of certiorari on a high-stakes climate lawsuit out of Colorado. The case is a part of the long-running lawfare campaign seeking to extract billions of dollars in jury awards from oil companies on claims of nebulous damages caused by carbon emissions.
In Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc., et al. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, major American energy companies are asking the Supreme Court to decide whether federal law precludes state law nuisance claims targeting interstate and global emissions. This comes as the City and County of Boulder, Colo. sued a long list of energy companies under Colorado state nuisance law for alleged impacts from global climate change.
The Colorado Supreme Court allowed a lower state trial court decision to go through, improbably finding that federal law did not preempt state law claims. The central question hangs on whether the federal Clean Air Act (CAA) preempts state common law public nuisance claims related to the regulation of carbon emissions. In this case, as in at least 10 other cases that have been decided in favor of the defendant companies, the CAA clearly does preempt Colorado law. It seems inevitable that the Supreme Court, if it grants the cert petition, would make the same ruling.
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Such a finding by the Supreme Court would reinforce a 2021 ruling by the Second Circuit Appeals Court that also upheld this longstanding principle of federal law. In City of New York v. Chevron Corp. (2021), the Second Circuit ruled that municipalities may not use state tort law to hold multinational companies liable for climate damages, since global warming is a uniquely international concern that touches upon issues of federalism and foreign policy. Consequently, the court called for the explicit application of federal common law, with the CAA granting the Environmental Protection Agency – not federal courts – the authority to regulate domestic greenhouse gas emissions. This Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, should weigh in here and find in the same way.
Boulder-associated attorneys have become increasingly open to acknowledging the judicial lawfare inherent in their case, as they try to supplant federal regulatory jurisdiction with litigation meant to force higher energy prices rise for consumers. David Bookbinder, an environmental lawyer associated with the Boulder legal team, said the quiet part out loud in a recent Federalist Society webinar titled “Can State Courts Set Global Climate Policy. “Tort liability is an indirect carbon tax,” Bookbinder stated plainly. “You sue an oil company, an oil company is liable. The oil company then passes that liability on to the people who are buying its products … The people who buy those products are now going to be paying for the cost imposed by those products.”
Oh.
While Bookbinder recently distanced himself from the case, no notice of withdrawal had appeared in the court’s records as of this writing. Bookbinder also writes that “Gas prices and climate change policy have become political footballs because neither party in Congress has had the courage to stand up to the oil and gas lobby. Both sides fear the spin machine, so consumers get stuck paying the bill.”
Let’s be honest: The “spin machine” works in all directions. Make no mistake about it, consumers are already getting stuck paying the bill related to this long running lawfare campaign even though the defendants have repeatedly been found not to be liable in case after case. The many millions of dollars in needless legal costs sustained by the dozens of defendants named in these cases ultimately get passed to consumers via higher energy costs. This isn’t some evil conspiracy by the oil companies: It is Business Management 101.
Because the climate alarm lobby hasn’t been able to force its long-sought national carbon tax through the legislative process, sympathetic activists and plaintiff firms now pursue this backdoor effort in the nation’s courts. But their problem is that the law on this is crystal clear, and it is long past time for the Supreme Court to step in and put a stop to this serial abuse of the system.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
President Trump revealed Wednesday afternoon that U.S. authorities intercepted a Cuba-bound oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast, a dramatic move aimed at tightening the squeeze on illicit oil networks operating throughout the region. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump described the vessel as “a very large tanker — the largest one ever seized in action,” hinting that more developments are coming. He declined to get into specifics, saying only that the operation happened “for a very good reason.” When asked about the tanker’s crude, Trump didn’t overcomplicate it. “Well, we keep it, I guess,” he said.
According to a U.S. official familiar with the operation, the seizure was executed by the Coast Guard with support from the U.S. Navy after a federal judge green-lit the warrant roughly two weeks ago. Another official told the New York Times the ship — identified as the Skipper — had been sailing under a falsified flag and has a documented history of trafficking illicit Iranian oil. The vessel, although carrying Venezuelan crude at the time, was seized because of those Iranian smuggling ties, not because of any direct connection to Nicolás Maduro’s regime.
Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple… pic.twitter.com/dNr0oAGl5x
— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) December 10, 2025
Vanguard, a UK-based maritime risk firm, confirmed Wednesday that the Skipper fits the profile of a tanker previously sanctioned by the United States for operating under the alias Adisa while moving banned Iranian oil. A source speaking to Politico said the ship was on its way to Cuba, where state-run Cubametales intended to flip the cargo to Asian brokers — an increasingly common workaround as U.S. sanctions isolate both Havana and Caracas from traditional buyers. With most Venezuelan product now flowing to China under the sanctions regime, oil traders began recalibrating almost immediately after the news broke. Prices ticked upward modestly as markets waited to learn whether any Venezuelan crude was on board and how much would be effectively taken off the table.
Maduro, for his part, avoided directly mentioning the seizure during a speech later Wednesday, instead railing against the United States and claiming Venezuela’s military stands ready “to break the teeth of the North American empire, if necessary.” His bluster did little to obscure the reality: the Trump administration just disrupted yet another shadowy oil operation linking Caracas, Havana, and Tehran — and sent a clear signal that these networks will be confronted, tanker by tanker.
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