Show Notes
After a third attempt on President Trump’s life — at the very hotel where President Reagan was nearly assassinated 45 years earlier – it is time fix both the Secret Service and our poisoned politics.
“The Secret Service has a zero-fail mission,” says former congressman Jason Chaffetz. “Everybody understands that what’s changed is that their aura of invincibility has been pierced because they have not adequately done their job.”
Leftist political dissenters aren’t doing their jobs well, either. While Trump, Vice President JD Vance and numerous cabinet secretaries and congressional leaders were still in the Washington Hilton ballroom following the incident, left-wing protestors outside the hotel were holding banners that read “DEATH TO ALL OF THEM.” Recent surveys have indicated that many who consider themselves “very liberal” also believe political violence is sometimes justifiable. Social media and overheated political rhetoric about “resistance” are taking their toll on our nation’s politics.
The US Secret Service faces intense criticism for its performance during the Butler, Pennsylvania attack in 2024 as well as this most recent near miss. USSS Director Sean Curran praised the performance of his agents and site work as “perfect,” but behind the scenes the agency’s record of corruption and inadequacy is being exposed.
On Background host Susan Crabtree brings fresh reporting on what transpired. Her sources inside the USSS are telling her that the agency’s training, recruiting, and management are all suffering, and that reform plans have been stiff-armed by Trump’s Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles.
On this episode of the On Background podcast, Crabtree welcomes Chaffetz, the former House Oversight committee chairman who spent years bird-dogging Secret Service slip-ups, problems, and scandals but was still shocked by the assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton two weeks ago. During his time in Congress, Chaffetz dealt with the Cartagena scandal – when agents were caught consorting with local prostitutes — as well as White House fence-jumpers who threatened Presidents Trump and Obama.
“It should be a bipartisan thing,” says co-host Eric Eggers. “But if we live in a world where, according to a recent poll, 48 percent of Democrats now think that the Butler assassination attempt was a fake, do we lack a kind of collective desire to treat this problem seriously?”
Chaffetz noted that it once was. When he investigated Secret Service misdeeds and screw-ups in 2014, he had a cooperative partner in ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) after a knife-wielding fence-jumper made it all the way to the White House building where President Barack Obama was located before he was stopped. Chaffetz is very critical of Secret Service performance at the Washington Hilton.
Looking at the video, he notes, “There were eleven agents and officers there, and ten of them weren’t paying attention. Only one guy was paying attention,” Chaffetz tells Crabtree. “[Secret Service Director] Curran’s talking about how great the training was. Are you kidding me? The shooter happened to trip. Otherwise, he probably would have continued to go forward.”
Chaffetz wonders how much training the agent who shot and missed five times at the assailant actually get? “One of stunning things I found in my investigation is that the average USSS person in their gets 30 minutes of training per year. That’s the average.”
The Secret Service has, he says, the lowest morale in the government, and the highest number of whistleblowers reporting on problems.
They are one thousand agents under-strength, overworked, and their training is insufficient, Chaffetz says.
Crabtree echoes what she has heard from her reporting – that diversity and inclusion (DEI) recruitment efforts that were ordered during the Obama and Biden presidencies have lowered standards and the quality of new hires.
Chaffetz says there are six steps to bring the Secret Service back to its best.
- Boost recruiting without diversity goals.
- Insist on regular, thorough training of all new and veteran agents in the field.
- Reduce the workload on individual agents. Some agents go for as long as 40 days without a day off, working 16-hour days when needed.
- Better practice. “Until last year, there was a ball field in Maryland where they would spray paint the White House outlines, and that’s where they practiced,” Chaffetz says.
- The Secret Service is woefully behind on “They’re woefully behind. I tried to contact George W. Bush’s office and tell them all the vulnerabilities he had. He wouldn’t hear anything about it. I said, ‘Well, it’s your life, sir.’ But I can tell you how to beat you and get in your house and kill you.”
- The sixth one is that there is no creativity there, by which he means the ability to out-think a potential assailant.
“When you score those six things and they’re all down in the ‘D’ and ‘F’ grades, then you got a recipe for disaster. Nothing has changed from the recommendations 10 years ago. It’s still the problem today.”
