By Mike Huckabee
July 23, 2024
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Disgraced Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle did show up to warm a chair at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee Monday. She may not have dodged a subpoena, but she dodged even the most basic questions put to her about the attempted assassination of President Trump.
That was to be expected. Still, the hearing wasn’t a total waste of time. One amazing thing Cheatle managed to accomplish was to bring Republicans and Democrats together --- in agreement that she should be fired immediately. Even Jamie Raskin and AOC are calling for her resignation.
Matt Vespa at TOWNHALL called this hearing “an absolute catastrophe for the Secret Service.”
Did you know that Cheatle has yet to visit the site of the shooting? Unbelievably, that is true. A bipartisan House panel of 12 lawmakers have already been there, and they vilified her for not seeing it firsthand. They climbed to the shooter’s vantage point and joked about the ever-so-slight slant of the roofline that Cheatle has used as an excuse for not putting agents up there. As reported on FOX NEWS, they were surprised to see how clear the line of sight was from the roof to the stage and noted the tree that obstructed the view of one of the counter-sniper teams.
Seeing that the highest point in the area was a water tower, they expressed frustration that a counter-sniper team had not been posted there. A mystified Arizona Rep. Eli Crane of the House Homeland Security Committee said, “I could tell that if any of our counter-sniper teams were up on that water tower, this individual wouldn’t have made it five feet.”
Crane tweeted, “As a former Navy SEAL sniper [yes, he is one], it was clear to me that many security measures were dropped making Pres. Trump extremely vulnerable. Many questions still remain.”
Of course, our big question still has not been answered: Why was President Trump allowed on stage before the possible threat from this very suspicious-looking person had been dealt with? Trump himself has commented on that, saying it’s not unusual for him to be told, “Mr. President, we have to wait another five or ten minutes before leaving the vehicle…”
During the hearing, Cheatle said she took “full responsibility” --- what a joke --- for what she called “the worst Secret Service failure since the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.” (She was reminded during the hearing that the head of the Secret Service at that time resigned.)
“I think that I’m the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time,” she said. Sorry, that’s about like saying Kamala Harris is the best person to lead the United States. Anyway, it’s not up to her. One catch, though: her boss is Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who also should resign!
Not surprisingly, both Cheatle and Mayorkas have declined to testify tomorrow before the House Homeland Security Committee, which has yet to formally subpoena them but apparently will have to.
An exasperated South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace was one of the more outspoken committee members, saying to Cheatle, “You’re full of (bleep) today. You’re just completely dishonest.” While we wish members of the U.S. Congress would use more professional language, she does happen to be correct.
Cheatle says their report will be released in 60 days. But since she was not forthcoming in Monday’s hearing, there are other places we can go in the meantime to find out more. We don’t go to the WASHINGTON POST very often for information, but this story looks interesting: “Secret Service said to have denied requests for more security at Trump events.”
The reports of four confidential sources support claims of “long-standing tensions that pitted Trump, his top aides and his security detail against Secret Service leadership, as Trump advisers privately fretted that the vaunted security agency was not doing enough to protect the former President.”
The Secret Service initially denied this in the aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life a week ago Saturday. But now they’re acknowledging that some of this might have happened. (It most certainly did; see specific examples in the article.) They’re citing “funding” as an excuse. Seriously, though, how much more would it have cost to include ONE OTHER BUILDING within the security perimeter and have eyes on it? And how much more would it have cost simply to keep Trump from going onstage until they could find and talk to that weird guy they saw wandering around in the background with a range finder? The answer: NOTHING. This had to be one of two things: a horrendous lapse in competency or a set-up.
We’ve learned from Trump’s near-death experience that it’s best to ignore the statements from Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Gugliemi because enough of what he has said has turned out to be untrue. He now relies on statements such as this, which sound impressive only if you don’t know how massively they’ve screwed up: “The Secret Service has a vast, challenging, and intricate mission. Every day we work in a dynamic threat environment to ensure our protectees are safe and secure across multiple events, travel, and other difficult environments. We execute a comprehensive and layered strategy to balance personnel, technology, and specialized operational needs.”
Note that he said they execute this strategy --- not that they execute it WELL.
There’s one new report involving an ATF agent that we’re definitely applying the 72-hour rule to, but here are the basics: According to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, a sniper team was first on the roof after the would-be assassin was killed, taking pictures of the scene and the shooter. They said they were approached by a man in a suit whom they assumed was Secret Service and were instructed to text those photos to a phone number that turned out to belong to an agent for the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives). As REVOLVER NEWS reports, “attempts to contact this mysterious agent have failed because he’s gone completely dark.”
We also learn from Sen. Johnson that on the morning of July 13, the day of the rally, the Secret Service did not attend the 9AM security meeting with local law enforcement. As Johnson told FOX NEWS’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, it was left to Butler County officials to “coordinate things.” And though we’d heard that everyone was on the same security radio channel, Johnson said they actually were separate. The counter-sniper and SWAT teams weren’t on the same channels as patrol officers or Secret Service, he said. “They had to relay things.”
In an effort to solicit more eyewitness testimony and video/audio that was taken that day, Sen. Johnson will soon issue a preliminary report, just scratching the surface. If you were at the rally that day or know anyone who was, please pass his request along to them --- their information could be vitally important.
“No matter how insignificant your piece of information might be,” the senator said, “it might, you know, lend to provide the full story of what happened…”
Sen. Johnson said he thought the request to send those photos taken of the dead shooter to an ATF agent was “very strange.” And although local law enforcement is being cooperative, he said, he’s getting “the runaround” when trying to contact Secret Service agents who were there that day on the ground.
“I wish I could rely and have faith in the FBI and Secret Service,” he said, “to do a truthful accounting of this, but that’s not been my experience, with the Russia collusion hoax, and for years dealing with federal law enforcement. We need completely separate and independent investigations, and it has to start now.”
It’s inevitable after any shooting event such as this that someone puts information together to try to implicate a mysterious second shooter. It just always happens. But Sen. Johnson --- who admits he’s not an expert --- has apparently seen some pretty compelling video suggesting there might have been one. And Director Cheatle didn’t help matters by refusing to say in the hearing whether or not the gunman acted alone or how many spent shell casings were on the roof. It’s too soon to start drawing conclusions about that, but there’s one thing we CAN conclude: that the FBI and Secret Service cannot be trusted to conduct what Sen. Johnson is calling for: “an honest, open, transparent investigation.”
So, assuming there was an ATF agent waiting somewhere for pictures of this rooftop crime scene, what does this tell us? Right now, we don’t know and will wait for evidence. But we will say this: Since the raid that killed Little Rock Airport executive Bryan Malinowski, we haven’t had any more trust in the ATF than we have in the FBI --- which is to say, none.
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