The U.S. Secret Service disputed reports on Sunday that said the agency diverted resources away from protecting former President Donald Tr...
The U.S. Secret Service disputed reports on Sunday that said the agency diverted resources away from protecting former President Donald Trump at his campaign rally to protect first lady Jill Biden, who was also in Pennsylvania at the time.
Jill Biden, who was in Pittsburgh, was not far away from Trump’s rally in Butler County, where a 20-year-old who donated to far-left causes shot the former president in an assassination attempt.
RealClearPolitics White House & National Political Correspondent Susan Crabtree reported on social media that sources told her resources were diverted away from Trump to protect the first lady.
“This is the problem that my Secret Sources have cited: Secret Services resources were diverted to Jill Biden’s event and away from Trump’s because they followed agency protocol applying to Trump as a former president, according to two sources within the Secret Service community,” she wrote. “There were also many supplemental agents from different field officers (not Trump’s regular detail) providing security at the rally because Trump’s regular detail has been overworked (some working 7 days straight), and only two counter-snipers.”
Anthony Guglielmi, Chief of Communications for the Secret Service, responded to Crabtree’s post, which garnered millions of views on X, by saying that it was false.
“Susan, this is very wrong,” he claimed. “We did not divert resources from FPOTUS Trump & protection models don’t work that way. As far as ‘field office teams’ these are the candidate nominee operations teams that are added during election years for the heavy travel tempo.”
Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino told Fox News on Sunday night that his sources indicated to him that there were fewer Secret Service agents at the event than are normally present.
“I’m getting from a number of sources that people are feeding to me their information — obviously because they want to fix it, they’re concerned that I think you’re going to see a lot of whistleblowers — I’m hearing that were very few, I don’t want to give an exact number, but very few actual Secret Service [agents] at that site,” he said.
He added that some security personnel at Saturday’s rally were temporary officials from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) who are not trained to carry out the same role as Secret Service agents.
“I’m also hearing that the counter sniper had a problem seeing over the elevation that’s why didn’t engage right away,” he said. “But that’s not the problem. The problem is, where the hell was the aerial visual support? Why was there no helicopter? Why was there no drone? Why was there no FLIR? Why was there no thermal? Forward looking infrared? How the hell is the crowd acting as the frickin counter surveillance?”
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