With former President Donald Trump surviving the would-be assassination attempt at his rally in Pennsylvania last week, the focus has shifted to why the Secret Service was unable to defuse the situation before any shots were fired, given reporting indicates they were alerted beforehand of the gunman's presence, and given claims by aides to Trump that the agents who tackled him to the ground actually put him in more danger.
There's a pretty simple explanation for it though, reporter Carol Leonnig told MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin — a lack of preparedness that has triggered security breaches going back decades.
"Talk to us a little bit ... about the culture of the Secret Service," said Mohyeldin. "I mean it frankly seems like the agency has been defensive in the criticism it has received of the event. Is it an organization that can be self-critical and address these issues or should there be some kind of out — what is the culture like? Should there be some kind of outside investigations to get to the questions that you are raising here, or can the organization self-investigate itself and course-correct?"
"Good question," said Leonnig. "You know, when I reported a series, a really gobsmacking series of security breaches by the Secret Service that made everyone sort of shake their head at how could this have happened, how could shots have been fired at the Obama White House in 2011 and the Secret Service bungled the investigation, didn't know shots had been fired there and hit the building for four days. How could a disabled veteran somehow get past 100-plus Secret Service personnel and agents at the grounds of the White House and get inside, deep inside the White House? How could that have happened? A string of others."
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The important thing to understand, she continued is that the Secret Service culture is reportedly "insular and defensive," with "a premium by senior leadership put on covering up mistakes rather than trying to fix them, covering them up so people could get promoted and not get in trouble for things that didn't go very well on their watch or on their leadership team."
"Now, I can't say that that is at the root of the problem that we just saw," Leonnig added. "What I can tell you is the evidence we have to date and the information I'm getting from inside the building is that the constrained, limited resources of the Secret Service, which was also a major contributor to events nine, ten, eleven years ago with all of these major security failures and breaches, that limited number of people, difficulty finding countersnipers, a small pool of people who can be drawn on for counterassault agents on the scene, just a limited number of, quote, unquote, 'bodies to throw at' all of these events during a campaign seems to be what the Secret Service is concluding contributed to this event, and contributed to the sort of holes in the security net around former President Trump on that day."
Watch the video below or at the link here.
Carol Leonnig details Secret Service security failures www.youtube.com
