Show Notes
On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers agree that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle should be fired.
The attempt on Trump’s life this past weekend in Butler County, Pennsylvania exposed the failure of Trump’s Secret Service detail to properly secure the venue where Trump spoke. Five minutes into his speech, shots were fired from the roof of a building just 150 yards from the dais, and Trump’s life was spared likely because he had turned his head to point at a screen just as a bullet was fired. The Secret Service has come under universal criticism for not guarding that building. “Heads have got to roll,” Schweizer said.
His comment echoes one made by Trump administration Attorney General Bill Barr. “I would fire [Cheatle] simply for having a tin ear and not coming out and being visible and saying something. Even if we don’t know the story, I think it’s still important to start the discussion and the transparency with the American people,” Barr told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, when asked whether he would fire Cheatle.
And Trump’s new running mate choice, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, also urges transparency, demanding a full-scale, independent investigation. “What worries me,” Vance said to Sean Hannity shortly after his nomination, “is why is there a shooter 150 yards from the president of the United States? It doesn’t make an ounce of sense. A lot of Americans are extremely worried about President Trump, and they’re very skeptical of the official narrative on anything. The way to fix that is get to the bottom of this, understanding what happened, and fixing it so that it doesn’t happen again.”
The Service used to be an elite unit until it was folded into the new Department of Homeland Security, now led by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. As Schweizer notes, the service’s priorities have changed under the Biden administration. Cheatle has prioritized increasing recruitment for female agents and this has led to some previously reported problems with agents in the field. One agent, Kelly O’Grady, was allowed to retire (with full benefits) after publicly saying she would not take a bullet for Donald Trump.
An unnamed female agent was removed from Vice President Harris’s detail for “distressing behavior” after an incident where she became unhinged and had to be placed in handcuffs while on duty at Andrews Air Force base. Schweizer noted that agent, Michelle Herczeg, previously filed a $1 million gender discrimination lawsuit against the city of Dallas while she worked as a police officer there.
Eggers spoke to Secret Service agents that told him they operate under a policy of not “proactively engaging” potential threats to their protectees, which may explain why the shooter in Butler was able to get off 5-8 shots at the stage, wounding Trump but also killing one man and wounding two other people, before Secret Service counter-snipers killed him.
All of this is prompting calls for a deep investigation of what went wrong, and Schweizer insists that neither the Secret Service, nor the FBI, are the right people to lead it. “Bring in law enforcement officers from across the country,” or the investigation will be a whitewash, Schweizer said.
The hosts also note the media and the Democrats newfound calls for “civility” in political commentary, or “lowering the temperature,” in the words of Biden following the shooting in Butler. This comes after both have spent years calling Trump a “fascist authoritarian” and comparing him, sometimes even unfavorably, to Adolf Hitler. Even MSNBC has pulled back, preempting its popular and often incendiary “Morning Joe” talk show on Monday after the weekend’s events.
As Barr also commented this weekend, “When someone is demonized to the extent Trump was being demonized, you are putting a target on them.”
“The question for the Biden campaign, though, is what do they do now?” Schweizer asked. He says the Biden campaign, because of the questions surrounding their own candidate’s mental decline, has largely focused on just that target, amping up the “threat to democracy” supposedly posed by their opponent.
It’s not only the campaign, but media personalities and celebrities such as comedian Kathy Griffin who famously posed with an effigy of Trump’s bloody, severed head, or pop stars like Madonna who wished someone would “blow him up,” or TV host Whoopie Goldberg, who said recently she would vote for Biden’s corpse because “it’s all about keeping Hitler out of the White House.”
As Eggers observes, they may be saying it’s time to turn down the temperature, “but give it three days.”
