Whistleblowers told Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that security personnel were "woefully unprepared" on the day former President Donald Trump was shot at a Pennsylvania rally, the UK Daily Mail reported. Hawley said that Homeland Security Investigations agents were assigned to Trump's detail without proper Secret Service training.
Trump was shot on July 13 during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and sustained an injury to his ear. It could have been much worse as gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to get near the former president and take his shot despite the Secret Service's presence.
Hawley and other members of Congress have begun asking how this could have happened. The answers they're getting are disturbing, especially considering that these whistleblowers report that things have not improved.
These individuals charged with protecting Trump were given a two-hour webinar training with prerecorded content to prepare for the rally and little else. "'This is a nightmare; the only reason we know about this stuff is because of whistleblowers," Hawley said Tuesday on Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime.
Protecting Trump, a former president and current GOP presidential candidate, is a job that requires precision and knowledge of proper procedure. Instead, Hawley shared that the whistleblowers were inadequately briefed using glitchy technology.
"Imagine 1,000 people logging onto Microsoft Teams at the same time after being informed at the last minute that everyone needed to login individually. Once it got rolling, the Secret Service instructor couldn’t figure out how to get the audio working on the prerecorded videos," Hawley shared from a letter from the whistleblower to USSS Acting Director Ronald Rowe Jr.
"All told, they restarted the videos approximately six times …. The content was not helpful," Hawley added.
To make matters worse, the whistleblowers said that the Secret Service has not learned from these mistakes, Fox News reported. "Nothing new, nothing improved since the assassination attempt on former President Trump," Hawley recounted from one of the whistleblowers.
However, it wasn't just the training that day that was the problem. As Hawley noted in a separate interview, the lead agent at the site was also the wrong person for such an important job.
"The site agent, the lead agent, was known to the Trump campaign to be inexperienced, to be ineffectual, to be, frankly, incompetent at their job. I'm also told by whistleblowers that on that day, she was not enforcing the normal security protocols," Hawley said at the time.
"She was not checking people's IDs. She did not use Secret Service agents," Hawley continued.
"Most of the agents there that day were not Secret Service agents. They were Homeland Security agents," Hawley noted.
Trump survived this attempt on his life by the grace of God. Unfortunately, it appears the Secret Service relied too heavily on that as well rather than properly training the people charged with protecting Trump's life.
