Secret Service security failures are revealed in damning document, that describes how agents allowed an armed guard with three arrests to ride in an elevator with President Obama
Secret Service failures that may have allowed the assassination attempt on Donald Trump were called out by a congressional watchdog nine years ago.
Now that watchdog is calling for the resignation of the agency’s chief, Kimberly Cheatle, on the day she is giving testimony to Congress.
In 2015 the House Oversight Committee published a 200-page damning report on the United States Secret Service (USSS) that described an agency ‘in crisis’ with ‘systemic mismanagement’, chronic underfunding, an ‘extraordinarily inefficient hiring process’ and ‘many employees [who] do not have confidence in agency leadership’.
Report author and former top Oversight staffer Tristan Leavitt, who now runs a whistleblower organization, told DailyMail.com that the Trump shooting showed those same problems persist today.
‘Almost a decade later, it looks like the Secret Service is suffering from some of the exact same problems it did 10 years ago,’ said Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight.
‘Whether Director Cheatle resigns or is removed, she should be replaced with a director from outside the agency who can clean shop from top to bottom
Leavitt pointed to reports that critical security at last weekend’s Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was left to potentially inexperienced or under-trained counter-sniper teams from local police rather than crack Secret Service units, as well as evidence of likely poor communication between local police and USSS.
Leavitt’s 2015 report highlighted previous stunning failures in presidential security, including officials in 2014 allowing then-POTUS Barack Obama in an elevator with an armed guard with a criminal history of three arrests including shooting at a fleeing vehicle with a child inside.
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The man also later slipped between agents and got inside Obama’s security formation.
The report detailed a March 2015 incident ‘where two intoxicated senior USSS officials—including a top official on the President’s protective detail—interfered with a crime scene involving a bomb threat just outside the White House grounds.’
‘As bad as those and other details were, they were just symptoms of a much larger breakdown in the USSS,’ Leavitt said. ‘Clearly their leadership hasn’t learned its lessons, and a massive overhaul is still needed.’