DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Trump Shooting Incident

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ma...t-service-whistleblowers-tell-sen-hawley

They would be, but this article has a whistleblower who says they werent even SS.

It seems like security at this event failed at every single level.

More like, they are not trained. And don't get me wrong, they are very brave individuals to put themself in the line of fire, but this effort from beginning (site inspection) to end (can't even get out through a locked gate and have to ram a vehicle through a fence) was beyond "poor effort" and damn near farcical.

I'm waiting for some crazy conspiracy theories, because they've left themselves wide open to them. Particularly their feckless leader, she won't even address anyone about his event without a subpoena. She should have already been fired.

As far as the removal of Trump: They should have been practically running him off the stage, that's the only way I've ever seen it done. You don't stop or pause, you don't do photo ops. Another former SSA commented that day one, lesson one, in protocol, is to take him to the other side of the car. Not the side facing the crowd, duh.

It took them way too long to get him away from the scene, then took ten of them to fumble around and figure out how to get him through a gate.

This whole event more resembles and episode of The Andy Griffith Show than real life.

I'm gonna go ahead and quote my original post, because this is "Houston, we have a problem" material. Either people are telling some serious lies, or much, much worse. Ie... I sure hope they're lying...



Again, from the original article I provided:

“There was local police in that building – there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building,” Cheatle said.

A source familiar with the investigation told CNN that snipers were stationed inside the building. The local sniper team, which hailed from the Butler County Emergency Services Unit, was located on the second floor providing overwatch of the crowd at the rally, the source said.


Cheatle said those snipers were inside the building because of "safety issues" concerning the slope of the roof.








These are my own images and notations from Google. I haven't seen anyone mention this nationally.







What's wrong with this picture?

Well, there's a few issues based on your picture.

1) The 2 story building's roof is not sloped. It's flat.
2) The 2 story building overlooked the assassin's position.

So, it's all lies. And they are all incompetent.

Or it was all planned. But, personally, I think its all lies. And they are incompetent.

Well Well, what do you know? We finally agree on something. the SS failed completely on this one. I guess the head of the SS is meeting with Congress on Monday.

My guess is this is more about complacency than incompetence, at least from the boots on the ground. They are trained well, but nothing ever happens. It gets to be routine that nothing happens.

Well, you nailed both issues, but it's #2 that opens a huge can of worms.

As far as the "lies or planned", I'm starting to waver, but everyone knows how hard it is to create counter-lies once you start lying, so there's that. In this case, there is just waaay too much crap not adding up...

I think it's convenient that after the ABC interview, Cheatle has gone zero-dark-thirty, obviously was told to stfu. Lack of any further info puts us in an interesting point on the flowchart.


Box #1: There was no sniper team on the second floor.

So either Cheatle is lying directly or was lied to.

OR ~ It's possible there was a team planned and then the plans changed. It's been said numerous times that the agency is short staffed especially during an election cycle. The White House made a late announcement Wednesday that Jill Biden would be in Pittsburgh Saturday to attend an Italian Sons and Daughters of America dinner, so they suddenly had two events in close proximity.

If there was a sniper team removed, or that team was cancelled, the next question is whether she was notified. If so, she would have to be aware that it opened a serious threat as the building is the only threat. If not, it points to a possible deeper plot.

Then again, the fact that there were not snipers on the roof in the first place was met with a response that would have to rank as one of the lamest excuses I've ever heard. So we're already jumping the shark to come up with this box anyway.


Box #2: There was a sniper team on the second floor.

And now we enter magic bullet territory... There was a sniper team on the second floor to overlook the crowd. But in their direct line of site, approximately 50 - 75 feet away:

The did not see a gunman climb onto the roof
They did not hear the gunman on a metal roof
The did not see him for the entire 20 minutes he was on the roof
They did not see or hear the altercation with the local cop that climbed the roof to investigate
They did not hear any of the people 15 feet below yelling "there's a guy on the roof, he's got a gun!"

What I want to know is, when the police confronted the shooter on the roof and backed down, why didn't he radio SS (or whichever agency had the sniper on the roof behind trump)? He knew the shooter had a gun. If he radioed SS, they would have taken the shooter out immediately.

Local law enforcement said they and the SS were on different radio channels. Makes sense, right? He radioed his own dudes and they came running from the traffic control they were relegated to so that they could try and assist. IIRC, they arrived too late to make a difference.

So the SS says they don't have enough help, recruit some peeps from homeland security, recruit local police, then tells the locals to watch for traffic and stay on a different channel?

Can't make any of this crap up.

Someone in the local law enforcement command center can radio SS on their channel or straight call them.

It doesn't make much sense to have 2 agencies police an event and have no way for them to communicate.

Well, there were actually three if you count Homeland Security.

Fitting.

I worked in security for the FBI, so this seems VERY strange to me.

I can certainly understand why you no longer do.

It was my college job. I graduated college and moved away. I was exceptional at my job.

Well of course you were.

j/c... trying to bone up:


AI Overview
Learn more
…
Yes, discrediting someone is a form of gaslighting:

Making up stories
Gaslighters may create false stories about things that were or were not said.

Spreading rumors
Gaslighters may spread rumors or gossip about someone to others. They may also lie and tell others that people think this way about the victim.

Questioning abilities
Gaslighters may discredit or question someone's abilities to others. For example, they may make a coworker feel unskilled or mentally off to appear competent to their supervisor.

Calling someone crazy
Gaslighters may pretend to be concerned about someone while subtly telling others that they seem emotionally unstable or "crazy". They may also convince others that their partner is crazy, which discredits the partner if they speak out about abuse.

Claiming children should be evaluated by mental health professionals while having no indication there's any symptoms that suggest they should be.

Acting as though they don't understand that having someone to confide in help alleviate isolation.

Then gaslighting by attacking the one who points that out by posting something totally unrelated to the topic while accusing other of doing the gaslighting.

Nothing new there by your kind.

Investigators piece together a puzzling portrait of the shooter who sought to assassinate Trump

After conducting more than 200 interviews and combing through his phone and internet search history, federal investigators have pieced together an early portrait of the man who sought to assassinate former President Donald Trump: Thomas Matthew Crooks was an intelligent, unassuming loner, who expressed an interest in guns and was far from outspoken about politics.

But the emerging profile of Crooks nearly a week after the shooting has left authorities puzzled about a motive for his assault and has had investigators speculating that his intentions may have been less politically motivated and more about attacking the highest-profile target near him.

The investigation remains in its early stages, officials caution. Still, in some ways, Crooks seems similar to the dozens of other young men who’ve wreaked havoc across the US with high-powered assault-style rifles in recent years. He had few close friends, he would often go shooting at a local firing range, and he didn’t seem to display strongly held views that would suggest a politically driven assassination, according to CNN interviews with law enforcement and a review of notes from a briefing to Congress.

In addition to the former president, Crooks had searched online about President Joe Biden and had photos on his phone of other prominent figures from both parties. He searched for the location of Trump’s rally as well as the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the briefing notes say, and discovered that Trump planned to appear just an hour’s drive away from his home in the Pittsburgh suburbs.

That suggests Crooks may have been looking to carry out a high-profile shooting, and the Trump event’s proximity and timing offered the most accessible opportunity, federal officials have speculated.

“Even though he didn’t get his primary target, the shooter was successful in a lot of ways because he got closer to doing something no one has done in decades,” one federal official told CNN, referring to the assassination of a presidential candidate.

It remains unclear if Crooks intended to carry out a much larger attack and started with Trump because that was the way to gain the most notoriety.

Crooks had also searched for information on another recent mass shooter who shot and killed four classmates at a Michigan high school in 2021. The web searches about that shooter, Ethan Crumbley, are consistent with what law enforcement officials have seen in other mass shooters who research people they wish to emulate, in part, as a way to form their own idea of how to do something bigger, the federal official said.

But there are also significant differences between Crooks’ behavior and that of a typical mass shooter. On the day of the attack, Crooks appeared to have been specifically targeting Trump – not aiming at the crowds in an attempt to kill as many people as possible. While he had an improvised explosive in the trunk of his car, it’s not clear if he planned to set it off to kill people or as a distraction.

Kathleen Puckett, a former FBI behavioral analyst who worked on the case of the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, said that Crooks also appeared to have less firepower than many mass shooters, who often carry multiple weapons and wear body armor.

“It didn’t look to me like he was ready for an assault,” Puckett said, while noting the limits of publicly available information. “It looked to me like he was taking a window that he saw a vulnerability in where he felt that he was unobserved to the extent he could get off some critical shots.”

In addition, unlike other mass shooters who often leave behind writings to explain their attacks, authorities have thus far recovered few clues, in Crooks’ bedroom or online.

That is frustrating experts who are trying to piece together his mindset – and raising comparisons with Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed 60 people in Las Vegas in 2017. Nearly seven years after America’s deadliest mass shooting, investigators still do not know why Paddock pulled the trigger.

Like the Las Vegas massacre, “this may be a situation where the more we know, the less we understand about the exact reason why,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and a CNN national security analyst.

Crooks’ family members told investigators he did not openly discuss politics, and evidence recovered at his home shed no further light on his political values or ideology, according to a readout shared with CNN that details a briefing that FBI and US Secret Service officials gave lawmakers Wednesday.

Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former FBI profiler, said that based on the evidence assembled so far, she thought that Trump’s rally was “very appealing” to Crooks in part because it “fell in his backyard.”

“This gave him incredible attention and catapulted him to a point where I think that’s why he chose this,” she speculated.

Still, Puckett called lone offenders – who largely remain invisible before attacks – “one of the prickliest problems out there” for law enforcement, and warned against a rush to find simple answers about Crooks’ motive.

“Whatever his story turns out to be, it’s not going to be simplistic, I don’t think – it’s going to be more complicated,” Puckett said. “You don’t want the simplistic version. You want every detail you can find.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/politics/trump-rally-gunman-portrait-motive-invs/index.html

j/c...

You know what we'll learn from SS Director Kimberly Cheatle today in here testimony before congress?

Absolutely NOTHING. Every answer is "I don't have that information", "I can't provide that information", "I won't go into specifics", "I'm not clear on the timeline", "we won't know until the investigation is complete". Every answer, no matter how simple or mundane the question. People on both sides of the aisle getting irate at the notion that she won't provide anything after nine days.

I do not understand how she will walk out today and still have a job. What is the sense in retaining her? She presided over the biggest utter failure in the history of the SS, provides no answers, and basically takes no responsibility under the guise of "investigation". Having her involved in the investigation is, more likely than not, counterproductive to finding actual answers.

And oh, yeah, she says maybe we'll have some answers in 60 days.

AOC read her the riot act over that b.s.

As I posted before, she should have already been fired. I'm sure there may be some intricate details of how the Secret Service works that shouldn't be revealed due to national security issues in how you run your protection of government officials and candidates. But she dodged everything to cover her own ass. Listening to her was infuriating! And unlike popular belief that doesn't happen very often. In this case it cost one man his life and the life of two others to be seriously altered. The quicker she is fired the better!

House Republicans, Democrats call on US Secret Service chief to resign

WASHINGTON, July 22 (Reuters) - U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle rebuffed bipartisan calls to resign for security failures that allowed a would-be assassin to wound Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and rankled lawmakers by refusing to provide details about the incident.

The U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee's Republican chair, James Comer, and top Democrat, Jamie Raskin -- normally bitterly divided on most issues -- each called on Cheatle to step down.

"This committee is not known for its model of bipartisanship, and I think today we came together unanimously in our disappointment," Comer told Cheatle. "We don't have that confidence that you can lead."

Raskin said Cheatle had "lost the confidence of Congress at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country, and we very quickly need to move beyond this."

During more than 4-1/2 hours of often contentious proceedings, Cheatle called the July 13 shooting "the most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades," comparing the breakdown to the 1981 attempted assassination of former President Ronald Reagan.

But she repeatedly rebuffed calls to step down, saying at one point: "I think that I am the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time."

Monday's hearing marked the first round of congressional oversight of the attempted assassination at an outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was wounded in the ear, one rally attendee was killed and another injured. The suspected shooter, 20-year-old nursing home aide Thomas Crooks, was killed by law enforcement. It is not clear what his motive was for the shooting.

On Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray will appear before the House Judiciary Committee. House Speaker Mike Johnson is also due to unveil a bipartisan task force to serve as a nexus point for House investigations.

Item 1 of 9 U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle is sworn in during a House of Representatives Oversight Committee hearing on the security lapses that allowed an attempted assassination of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., July 22, 2024. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt

In the face of Republican claims that the Secret Service denied resources to protect Trump, Cheatle said security for the former president had grown ahead of the shooting.

"The level of security provided for the former president increased well before the campaign and has been steadily increasing as threats evolve," Cheatle said.

She added that the Secret Service provided the security sought by the Trump campaign for the rally.

But Cheatle repeatedly declined to answer questions from openly frustrated Republicans and Democrats about the security perimeter, what officials knew of potential threats and the decisions they made, and the suspicious behavior of the suspect.

"Tell us what went wrong," Republican Representative Pete Sessions implored her. "Tell us, and don't try and play a shell game with us."

Cheatle said she wanted to provide factual information but cited multiple ongoing investigations, including an internal probe due to be completed within 60 days.

Lawmakers of both parties rejected the idea of a 60-day delay and accused Cheatle of stonewalling Congress.

"The notion of a report coming out in 60 days when the threat environment is so high in the United States, irrespective of party is not acceptable," bristled Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us...congress-over-trump-shooting-2024-07-22/

It's Pat!!

I don't mean to be sexist, but that chick has no business being a Secret Service Agent. I mean, come on!

I'd rather see "Ramboish" men and women on the detail.

Yeah, this isn't a good look.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigns, sources say

US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has tendered her resignation amid scrutiny of security lapses related to the recent assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, sources tell CNN.

The move comes as lawmakers and an internal government watchdog move forward with investigations into the agency’s handling of Trump’s protection and how a gunman came close to the killing the 2024 Republican presidential candidate at a rally in Pennsylvania this month.

There have been bipartisan calls in Congress for her resignation and a push by Republican lawmakers to impeach her. Lawmakers were particularly incensed after her appearance for public testimony in front of the House Oversight Commitee Monday, where she was unwilling to answer many of the committee’s questions.

During her House Oversight appearance, Cheatle acknowledged that there were “significant” and “colossal” problems with the security at the rally, but still rebuffed demands for her resignation.

“I think I am the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time,” Cheatle said Monday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that the resignation is “overdue.”

“Now we have to pick up the pieces,” Johnson said. “We have to rebuild the American people’s faith and trust in the Secret Service as an agency. It has an incredibly important responsibility in protecting presidents, former presidents, and other officials in the executive branch, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

In the initial wake of the shooting, Cheatle was emphatic that she would not step down. Cheatle was appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the Secret Service in 2022.

In an interview with CNN last week, Cheatle said that the agency was “solely responsible” for the design and implementation of security at the Pennsylvania rally site, where the now-deceased gunman fired shots at Trump from an unsecured rooftop just a few hundred feet from the rally stage.

The bullets only narrowly missed Trump’s head, and the incident left one rallygoer dead and others injured.

As more has become known about the circumstances around the attempted attack, the Secret Service has been questioned about how it carried its protection of Trump that day, including the failure to control access to the rooftop and how the agency handled information, passed along by local law enforcement before the shooting, that identified the would-be assassin as a person acting suspiciously around the rally grounds.

The Secret Service and the Pennsylvania law enforcement, which assisted in the rally security efforts, have sometimes been at odds in their accounts of what happened and who was responsible for the lapses.

Cheatle had pledged her agency’s full cooperation with the congressional and internal government examinations of Secret Service’s approach to that day.

Cheatle had left a job managing Global Security at PepsiCo to take the USSS director post and before her stint in the private sector, had served in the Secret Service for 27 years.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/politics/secret-service-director-kimberly-cheatle/index.html

It's now official. She has resigned as she should have already.

I don't get people sometimes. Did you really expect a secret service person who is a woman to look like a runway model? Sheesh, that is like asking a offensive lineman to play cornerback.

She would probably dispose of you in a second. Good for her.

No. But people expect her to be able to holster her firearm in under five minutes. Maybe you missed that part of the cartoon.

As several federal LEOs I know have said "no agency practices holstering." It isn't important in this context at all.

As several federal LEOs I know have said "no agency practices holstering." It isn't important in this context at all.

You can say that again!

Where do you get this runway model crap? I do expect them to look competent, confident and in decent physical shape. You might want to temper your claim of disposing of me. We already know they couldn't dispose of an assassin in plain sight in a second.

The SS has a DEI policy that 30% of hires must be women. So either they arent very picky about those women, or not many applied.

I’m betting many of these secret service officers also worked in the Trump administration.

Probably the men did, yes.

There is a policy push in all FLE sectors to have a 30% quota.