Posted on 07/16/2024 12:00:52 PM PDT by Morgana
It was a grey, drizzly Monday on March 30, 1981, when President Reagan emerged from the Washington Hilton hotel, heading back to his presidential limousine parked a few yards away.
His inauguration had been only a few weeks before and he'd just finished speaking at a lunch of US labor union leaders.
Along with the rest of the White House press corps I was about 20 feet away, roped off from the President. Suddenly, just as one of our number shouted a question for him, shots rang out.
In a split second, a burly Secret Service agent brusquely bundled Reagan into the limo, another pushed his colleague hard to ensure both he and the President were flat on the back seat.
The limo was surrounded by agents, guns drawn, the would-be assassin wrestled to the ground by the public as well as law enforcement. Reagan's vehicle sped off.
Within four minutes it was at George Washington Hospital, even though, not initially realizing the President had been hit (a bullet had entered his rib cage), the Secret Service had at first started out for the White House.
Reagan was close to death on arrival. But he survived, thanks in no small part to the speedy response of the Secret Service, which thwarted the shooter.
Now consider what happened when Donald Trump was shot on Saturday night.
The initial response was by the book. Brave agents piled on him to protect him from further bullets. They kept him down until they were told the shooter had been killed.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Buttinsky Jill Biden pick, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, has expressed her far-left goals to increase the percentage of female S/S agents to 30% by the end of the decade.
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Brought to you direct from Biden’s Tokenland.
The girlie DEI hire has amazing gravitas.
image from floppingaces.net
It's worse than that. Much worse. Local cops wanted to stay cool.
She may be an incompetent moron, but that she took the hit for the local cops is perhaps her one minuscule saving grace.
If the command and control worked properly President Trump would have been hustled off the stage.
The sniper issue was just one piece of the plot.
I would argue the communications that did not happen was even more important.
Communications were made by both police and Secret Service into their comms.
Presumably they were received by a central communications station (unless signals were jammed).
Then either no signal was sent to the stage or it was jammed.
Communications is the key.
The communications breakdown was not a “mistake”.
It was intentional—by somebody.
Start digging up dirt on her. She’s an idiot and they just need to prove it.
Instead we get dachshunds forming a scrum around a giraffe.
Incompetence is obvious but I’d hate to see it blamed for what is surely deliberate malice. There must be some attempt at accountability.
I notice in that scene of Trump getting hit in the ear that it is the women in the crowd that react first.
Then there’s one guy on the left who just looks clueless for the longest time.
You’re probably right. If so, hopefully Comer can get to the bottom of it.
I watched a video of a former SEAL and one of the things he said was that the police and SS were on different radio channels so the communications were all screwed up.
Obviously the SS snipers on the roof behind Trump knew about the shooter and it’s claimed they communicated to ask permission to take the shooter out. If the SS people close to Trump were able to hear communications from their own they should have known immediately to get Trump under cover - when a sniper right behind you is requesting permission to take out an assassin.
I doubt there was time for that, lol.
Just horrible and indefensible. A brave man lost his life because of this, and another brave man almost did. When I was a kid we made bike ramps steeper than that.
Not from what I saw. Trump grabs his ear and ducks down, all BEFORE a single agent showed up. It was long enough that I yelled at my husband, where's the SS?!?!? Then they stumbled and bumbled their way to standing and awkwardly got him off the stage. Honestly, he could've done a better job without them. That's my opinion.
The initial response was by the book. Brave agents piled on him to protect him from further bullets. They kept him down until they were told the shooter had been killed.But they had no idea if others shooters were involved and, as they escorted him off the podium, they left him badly exposed, partly because some of the agents were not tall enough to give him proper cover.
If there had been a second shooter they would have had a clear line of sight as Trump fist-pumped the air.
There was even more chaos by the time they reached Trump's SUV. Far from the efficient, speedy exit all those years ago outside the Washington Hilton, it took too long to get him in the vehicle and even longer for it to depart.
Agents were darting about, some running in circles, clearly not sure what to do. One, overweight and looking panicked, pointed her gun all over the place. Another had trouble holstering her pistol. A third found time to put on her sunglasses and straighten her jacket.
Perhaps it was just a coincidence - but when Trump entered the Republican National Convention hall in Milwaukee on Monday night, his security detail was made up almost exclusively of tall, chunky men.
The Secret Service endlessly game-plans and practices evacuations. 'Get him and go' is the simple guidance. The Secret Service likes to regard itself as the global gold standard for the protection of public figures. Not after Saturday night.
But what happened after Trump was shot is the least of its problems.
How the shooter ever managed to get any shots off in the first place has the makings of the biggest crisis of modern times for the Secret Service.
Security experts are still baffled that a roof top overlooking the presidential podium, just over a football-field away and with an elevated, unobstructed view of Trump, could have been left unguarded so that the shooter could make it on to the roof and then, unhindered, position himself for his assassination attempt.
The Secret Service has yet to offer a credible explanation for this. Instead its director, Kimberly Cheatle, incredibly appeared to tell ACB News on Tuesday that health and safety protocol was to blame.
'That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,' she said.
Snipers on a sloped roof.Cheatle and her acolytes have also been busy throwing local law enforcement under the bus.
The warehouse on top of which the shooter clambered (we still don't know exactly how) was outside the Secret Service's perimeter of responsibility, she claims. It was the job of local police to secure it - and it's true that local law enforcement has some questions to answer.
It's been revealed that a local police counter-sniper team was stationed inside the warehouse. They were using it as a 'watch post' to scan for threats.
Pity nobody thought of having a look at the roof of the building they were occupying since its location and view overlooking the rally made it the most obvious threat. Perhaps the Keystone Cops were on duty at the weekend.
Local police also failed to react to people on the ground around the warehouse shouting that there was somebody, possibly with a rifle, on the roof, a few minutes before he started firing. Several videos provide convincing evidence to confirm this - and of the police's lackadaisical response.
'Look, they're all pointing,' one man is heard saying as he pans his smart phone from the stage to the roof of the warehouse, where a figure is seen crawling. 'Yeah someone's on top of the roof - look!'
The police don't seem to react, though there are reports that one local cop climbed a ladder leaning against the warehouse wall (used by the shooter?). He saw the would-be assassin when his head reached roof level - and quickly ducked back down the ladder when the shooter trained his AR-15 on him, before he then turned back unimpeded to take his shots at Trump.
Another report extraordinarily claims that local police noticed the shooter on the roof 26 minutes before he opened fire, and even took a picture of him.
Clearly, the police incompetence on depressing display during the Uvalde school massacre shooting in Texas two years ago was not a one-off.
But the Secret Service cannot be allowed to pile the blame on a police force in rural Pennsylvania with no expertise or experience in protecting high-profile targets.
It is the job of the Secret Service to devise and give final approval for the security blueprint covering events like Saturday's rally. It is the responsibility of the Secret Service to ensure all vulnerable points are covered, inside and outside their specific perimeter, even when local police provide the manpower.
Agents were darting about, some running in circles, clearly not sure what to do. One, overweight and looking panicked, pointed her gun all over the place. Another had trouble holstering her pistol. A third found time to put on her sunglasses and straighten her jacket.
The standards and governance of the Secret Service are clearly less rigorous than they once were. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at the weekend has made that painfully obvious for all to see.
Above all, it was incumbent on the Secret Service to ensure that such an obvious security weakness as the warehouse was properly policed. One drone with infrared sensors would quickly have spotted the shooter, probably before he even made it to the roof. If that drone had been equipped with offensive capabilities, the shooter could have been taken out long before he ever managed to pull his trigger.
But we understand no drones were deployed. Why not?
It would seem the Secret Service under Director Cheatle has had other priorities. A former Secret Service agent told me privately that she quit because field agents were understaffed (working 60 consecutive days with no time off).
Money has instead been diverted to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Investment in new technology, including state-of-the-art drones, was also sacrificed at the altar of DEI.
Director Cheatle was appointed two years ago by President Biden with the blessing (perhaps even active support) of his wife Jill.
Cheatle had been on the Biden family's security detail when Joe Biden was Vice President. Jill Biden is obsessed with DEI, like most leftwing pseudo-academics. Cheatle talks more about reaching 30 percent female agents by 2030 than she does about protecting those under her agency's tender care. Her ambition is all over the Secret Service website.
When I was a White House correspondent in the 1980s, the Secret Service was part of the US Treasury Department, a hard taskmaster.
Now it is part of Homeland Security, whose boss, the hapless Alejandro Mayorkas, is also 'passionate' about DEI. He also assures us the Southern border with Mexico is secure.
No doubt its shortcomings will be revealed in agonizing detail by the numerous congressional committees about to investigate it. I'd be surprised if Cheatle survives the scrutiny.
She could always return to be head of 'global security' at PepsiCo, from whence she came. They're big on DEI there too - but the consequences are less profound for American democracy.
The one female agent on the podium, not as tall as his shoulder. Center mass on him was right through her head.
You want some large tall torso in a ballistic vest interposed.
Trump’s suit and shirt same color as SS suit and shirt. Hides him in the scrum.
Now imagine Pelosi or other woman in a bright power suit or floral dress. As women rise high they may need to dress quiet. KH is a fairly quiet dresser, neutrals.
“police and SS were on different radio channels so the communications were all screwed up.”
Even if true that explains nothing—because the SS folks outside the stage were notified by witnesses that a guy with a gun was on the roof.
The SS internal comms had to be either sabotaged, jammed or stopped by a central comm location—regardless of what was happening with the local LEO.
Whoever the snipers asked permission from to neutralize the shooter - and who denied that permission, reportedly - would have known there was no SWAT team on the roof.
Also, no SWAT team ever would be dressed like this shooter was, and the scopes the snipers had would have made it really easy to know this was not LE on the roof, which is why they requested permission to take out the shooter.
The big question is who denied the permission.
That is an extremely mild roof pitch for a metal roof. Very easy to walk on when dry.
From what I've read about Secret Service Director Kimberly A. Cheatle, she is a docturd Jill Biden suggestion for her doddering old senile fool, Joey. Is there anything the Biteme's can't foul up?
Good thing the Marines had some ropes for the cliffs of Iwo Jima and not some minor skateboard slope.
I agree. There was no excuse for them not keeping Trump away from the podium.
If the SS internal comms were deliberately sabotaged it would make it easy to prove this was not just mind-bogglingly-impossible incompetence, which is what they’re going to try to use as an excuse.
The point in all of this is how to prove that it was deliberate and not just incompetence. Communications sabotage would be one way to prove that, if that could be documented.
If it is true that the snipers requested and were denied permission that would be another way to prove that the assassination attempt was deliberately allowed.
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