A Department of Homeland Security inspector general report has confirmed what many suspected about the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania: the security failures were not bad luck but a spectacular chain of preventable incompetence. As USA Journal reported, the details are somehow worse than anyone imagined, and that is saying something because people imagined some pretty bad stuff.
Here is the headline detail that will have you staring at your screen in disbelief. While Thomas Crooks was positioned on a rooftop 155 yards from Trump with a rifle, a Secret Service counter-drone operator whose literal entire job was to prevent this exact scenario was typing a search query into Google. Local law enforcement had already spotted Crooks on the roof at 6:09 p.m. and called it in. The counter-drone operator, rather than picking up a radio and asking someone where the AGR building was, decided to consult the world's most popular search engine. Crooks fired his first shot at 6:11 p.m. Two minutes. The man had two minutes and spent them Googling.
Corey Comperatore, a retired volunteer fire chief, died that day after throwing himself over his wife and daughter to shield them. Two other rallygoers were gravely wounded. Trump survived a bullet to the ear by a fraction of an inch. And somewhere in that security perimeter, a federal agent was browsing the internet like he was trying to settle a bar bet.
It gets worse, because of course it does. A Secret Service site agent had proposed using trucks already on the grounds to block the line of sight from the AGR building to the stage. Campaign staff rejected the idea because the vehicles would mess up the camera shot. Aesthetics over assassination prevention. Bold choice. The agreed-upon alternative security measure was then never actually implemented. Nobody followed up. Nobody checked. Nobody did anything, apparently, except Google.
The lead agent on the ground, Miyo Perez, was described in the report as relatively inexperienced for an assignment of this magnitude. The two supervisors who oversaw her planning and signed off on a security arrangement that left Trump exposed to a clear line of fire from an unsecured rooftop faced zero discipline. They were promoted. One of them, Sean Curran, who ultimately approved the Butler security plan, is currently the Director of the United States Secret Service. The man whose agency produced one of the most catastrophic protective failures in modern American history is now running the agency. That is not a typo.
Multiple agents were suspended without pay after Butler, which sounds like accountability until you remember that a man is dead, two others nearly died, and the future president had to wipe his own blood off his face in front of millions of viewers. Suspensions without pay are what you give someone who parks in the wrong spot too many times, not someone whose failures contributed to an assassination attempt.
The American people were told the system works. The system was on Google.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
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