Five Secret Service agents — including the agent directing the entire state — have been suspended over the massive security failures that resulted in the near assassination of Republican nominee for president Donald Trump.
Pennsylvania Secret Service chief Timothy Burke and four others have been placed on “administrative leave” and taken out of the field as the investigation into their failures continues.
According to CBS News:
One agent on Trump’s detail and three others in the Pittsburgh office were among those placed on leave, according to two federal law enforcement sources. It’s unclear if all of these actions are disciplinary, since agents are routinely placed on leave during the course of investigations for various reasons, including mental health relief.
The Secret Service’s internal affairs division is continuing to investigate how a 20-year-old gunman was able to fire eight rounds from a rooftop near where Trump was speaking in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, including one shot that grazed the Republican presidential nominee’s ear.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi declined to confirm the agents were placed on leave, saying he would not comment on a personnel matter. But he said the service’s “mission assurance review is progressing, and we are examining the processes, procedures and factors that led to this operational failure.”
One man, Corey Comperatore, was killed and another rally attendee was seriously injured when Thomas Crooks opened fire from the roof of a nearby warehouse he had climbed on top of as the Secret Service ignored the commanding position from which a shooter to take out the former president.
The massive failure has given rise to many who feel that it seems clear the Secret Service wanted Trump assassinated and at the very least they were purposefully lax in their security arrangements because they just didn’t care if they actually had made sufficient plans to protect Trump.
Ohio Republican Jim Jordan found that Burke knew full well that the plans to protect Trump were insufficient.
Jordan said whistleblowers had told him that on a Secret Service-led briefing on July 8, five days before the Trump rally, ‘the USSS Special Agent in Charge Tim Burke reportedly told law enforcement partners that the USSS had limited resources that week because the agency was covering the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Washington, D.C.’
Federal law enforcement agents have been coming forward to Congress to blow the whistle on the alleged ongoing debacle inside the Secret Service which led to July’s stunning security failure, as well as other problems.
Tristan Leavitt, president of watchdog Empower Oversight which represents some of those whistleblowers, railed against the Secret Service’s lackluster response to the shooting in a public statement, saying that Burke and the four other USSS officials should have been placed on leave immediately rather than just being assigned desk duties while they are investigated.
These people are criminals. They should be thrown off the job and their pensions eliminated.
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