My Own Conjecture on the Secret Service and the Assassination Attempt

I have no facts, only a few educated guesses about what might have happened a week ago at the rally where former President Trump was speaking. Thus, I will call it pure “conjecture” on my part, without an ounce of actual information. No, it is not a conspiracy theory!

First, from all the reports I’ve read about the Secret Service over the years, they have done a masterful job of protecting the people they are charged to protect. They have to be “right” all the time and one miss-step can be deadly.

They have had some bad press in recent years causing former directors of the Secret Service to resign. A crazy dude making it across the White House lawn and into the actual building—the most secure home in the world. Then there was the Secret Service Sniper Teams partying the night before an event and partaking of the services of prostitutes. None of which would have been revealed, except for one agent who refused to “pay up.”

Several studies by internal administrations and congress have found that they are underfunded for the number of people they are required to protect, yet funding needed and recommended for increased staffing was never provided.

Which brings us to last week. From my experience, there are two aspects of “what might have taken place.”  One is with any “hot shot” preeminent organization, they can become “for lack of a better description” full of themselves.  The mentality of, “We are the experts, we know how to do this and your role is to do what we tell you to do.”

There is that aspect. So while they have “partners” they are not “full-fledged” partners in the mission to be executed. The other thing—I am only guessing at, is how “incident command” is executed by the Secret Service. Do they even have such a thing? There should be “one single command post” with multiple stations for all law enforcement agencies have a senior representative to help paint the security situation and respond to incidents—should they occur. Thus, you have a common operating picture in a single location. There are not multiple command posts with each agency in their own vehicle, etc. While the above is to be expected in a unified command situation…there is nothing to say it did happen that way.

Much has been reported about attendees spotting someone crawling on a roof and then officers responding to investigate. Did the officers call what they had been told into a command post, and they were investigating? Evidently once the shooter pointed his rifle at an officer who had direct observation of him, there wasn’t time for him/them to react and make a call.

Small mistakes can balloon into really terrible situations.

Here ends my conjecture.