After a gunman shot up the White House a decade ago, exposing vulnerabilities at one of America’s iconic landmarks, lawmakers in Congress got an unexpected second dose of bad news.
“The Secret Service did not identify best practices and lessons learned from the 2011 White House shooting incident,” the Homeland Security Department inspector general wrote in a stinging 2016 report that warned that an agency with a zero failure mission failed to learn from one of its high-profile setbacks.
Now eight years later, with the Secret Service once again reeling from a spectacular failure, the same watchdog office is about to drop a fresh bombshell certain to impact the investigation into the near assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Congress was briefed this week that months before the assassination attempt on Trump, Secret Service managers were warned by the Homeland inspector general about serious deficiencies, including communication woes with local police partners and inadequate training for agents who conducted security sweeps at events for protectees, sources told Just the News on Wednesday night.
The concerns flagged by Homeland Security Department Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari were related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but involve issues that have also been raised in the Secret Service’s failures to stop a gunman from wounding Trump at a Butler, Pa., rally on July 13, the congressional aides said.
Some of the concerns could be made public as early as Thursday when Cuffari’s staff is expected to release to Congress a heavily redacted report that was completed in April and titled “USSS Preparation for and Response to the Events of January 6, 2021,” the aides said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because they weren’t permitted to talk to news media.