By Mike Huckabee
August 6, 2024
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These two Secret Service stories are connected, through the Department of Homeland Security inspector general who’s investigating both. (The Secret Service is under the purview of the DHS.)
First, we have more frustrating details on how local law enforcement had to communicate with the Secret Service about the gunman they’d been watching. As Laura Ingraham said Monday night, the WASHINGTON POST reported that “On three occasions, a local officer inside the Butler County command post had to relay information about [the shooter] to the Secret Service hub by cellphone --- on a day when cell service was balky and unreliable.”
That’s right, three times, a local commander had to use a cellphone to call a state trooper who would then relay the concern to the Secret Service.
One of these times was after a local counter-sniper communicated at 4:42 PM about “a younger white male, long hair, lurking around the AGR building. He was viewed with a range finder sighting the stage...We lost sight of him.”
According to WAPO, “A local police officer spotted [the shooter, whom we do not name] on a rooftop with a gun and radioed in to the local command center that he was ‘armed’ approximately 30 seconds before the shooting, according to the transcript of the radio communications and Secret Service officials, but that message was not passed on to the Secret Service command post before [the shooter] started shooting, the agency has acknowledged.” They couldn’t reach the Secret Service by radio.
Apparently, the cell service in the area wasn’t great, so they were also dealing with that frustration. In fact, when a local team member tried to send photographs of the suspicious person at 5:47 PM, he was advised by someone else on the channel that “internet and cell service is down.” At 5:49, he heard from a sheriff’s deputy by radio that “Your picture is probably not going to go through because I don’t have any service.”
Former Secret Service agent Frank Loveridge told Ingraham that “the proper protocol is to have one command post, a security room, in which all assets are in that room, with radios, ready to transfer any information that might be critical, so we get situational awareness, real-time. And that didn’t happen.” The Secret Service was in a separate command center on the opposite side of the property and, again, had no radio contact at all with the locals.
“Sensitive and critical information should never be passed on a cellphone,” Loveridge said, “because...you’re not paying attention when you’re typing a message, sending it, and getting it to someone else to pull it up and read it.” The delay is too long.
Loveridge said they knew this guy was a “special interest” at 4:26 PM. At 5:42 PM, “it basically became more important to see him,” because he was seen using a range finder “to sight towards the stage.” But they lost the individual for 20 minutes. And the counter-snipers were not communicating.
Loveridge is just one of many brave Secret Service agents, past and present, who are coming forward to give congressional investigators and interested media the big picture of this epic failure. That embarrassing congressional hearing with newly-appointed acting Director Ron Rowe infuriated some enough to turn them into whistleblowers. Perhaps the worst moment was when Rowe let slip that the July 13 rally was the first time they’d sent counter-snipers to a Trump rally. As FOX NEWS’ Jesse Watters said Monday, “Trump’s entire protective detail has been an illusion.”
According to whistleblowers who’ve spoken to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, it’s the lead site agent, or “site commander,” who had authority over how all this was set up. It’s this person’s responsibility “to make sure the line of sight from Trump’s position was clear, that agents could see all angles, and she [the lead] didn’t do that,” because the line of sight was obstructed. Whistleblowers have claimed this person was known to be “inexperienced and incompetent,” and that “none of it was done properly, none of it was done by the book.”
Hawley told Watters on Monday that they’ve said she “was not enforcing the normal security protocol” on that day. She didn’t check people’s IDs before allowing people into secure areas, Hawley said. It was “a total free-for-all.” People were just milling around, and “nobody knew who they were.” As for the ones who were supposed to be there, she mostly did not bring in Secret Service agents, as most of the agents there that day were Homeland Security. And here’s something new: Most of them had never worked a rally before, and had not been trained or integrated with the team.
“From top to bottom, it was a total disaster,” Hawley said. “...It is a miracle, a miracle, not only that Trump is alive, but that more good Americans were not killed.”
Anyone in a position of leadership on that day needs to be fired. But according to Rowe’s own sworn testimony, this person is still doing security --- Hawley noted that this includes investigations --- with her identify protected.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/
Now, to the Secret Service and the January 6 pipe bomb outside DNC headquarters. Investigative reporter Julie Kelly pointed out last week that Democrats have been trying hard to get rid of the Trump-appointed inspector general for Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari, ever since he notified Congress that Secret Service texts from January 5 and 6, 2021, had been “purged.” The purging had been done even though a federal directive had gone out to every agency to preserve all evidence related to J6. Cuffari opened a criminal investigation into the matter. (How dare he go looking where he shouldn’t.) Not surprisingly, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democrat who chaired the J6 committee, wants Cuffari gone.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Gugliemi claimed these texts had merely been deleted when cell phones were reset to factory settings as part of a device replacement program. Nothing to see here, folks! And never mind that they’d been ordered to preserve these messages because they were part of an ongoing investigation. (As we’ve pointed out, Gugliemi is not the most credible spokesperson, as he untruthfully denied the Secret Service had rejected the Trump team’s requests for additional security. We know they did. Seems you can’t spell “Gugliemi” without “l-i-e.”)
Gugliemi also flip-flopped on whether the texts were recoverable --- first yes, then no.
Cuffari is now the IG investigating the Secret Service’s handling of the July 13 rally and the attempt on Trump’s life, in addition to the pipe bomb case. After more than three-and-a-half years, no arrests have been made in the planting of pipe bombs near the DNC and RNC headquarters, supposedly on the evening before Trump’s J6 rally. As Kelly reports, we still don’t know why she left the Capitol building at 11:15 AM on January 6, following a briefing with the Senate Intelligence Committee, to go to the DNC headquarters, of all places. The official schedule said she was going home (!), but she showed up at the DNC with a Secret Service detail at about 11:25. Why did she leave the Capitol just before the history-making vote that was supposed to certify her as the first black female Vice President? Surely, she wouldn’t have wanted to miss that.
You know the story from there. The bomb-sniffing dogs (now confirmed to have been with her Secret Service detail) amazingly did not detect the bomb near the entrance to the DNC. Neither did officers from the Capitol Police and the DC Metro Police. It was apparently a plainclothes Capitol Police officer who discovered (“discovered”?) the bomb at 1:07 PM, while Kamala was inside the building. She was evacuated about 10 minutes later.
You’ve also seen the odd outdoor security-cam video showing officers reacting with inertia to the discovery of a BOMB, and schoolchildren allowed to walk on the sidewalk right next to it.
Kamala has never said a thing about the entire incident. As of now, we’re waiting for IG Cuffari to answer the many questions still unanswered, about this and also the gigantic security fail at Trump’s rally, while Democrats continue trying to stop him.
In case you missed the very detailed REVOLVER NEWS report on this that we linked to yesterday, here it is again. It’s a lot to digest, so hold it for when you have time.
Also, this REVOLVER piece from a few weeks ago about Kamala’s strangely-timed, still-unacknowledged visit to DNC headquarters on J6 takes on new relevance now that she’s the presumed nominee.
https://revolver.news/2024/07/
Reporter Susan Crabtree, who’s been covering the Secret Service for about 12 years, heard last week from a whistleblower that management asked for his cell phone “a few months after J6,” when the IG started his investigation of their handling of January 6. Once they took the phone, the whistleblower “never saw it again,” and the new phone did not contain the old texts and email. Timing would suggest that this wasn’t just a routine “purge” of their phones but that top officials had found a need to wipe evidence.
As the whistleblower said to Crabtree: “I soon discovered in the Secret Service people lie, they do all these things. It’s just their culture.”
Crabtree posted on X that the IG report “confirmed, among other things, that the cell phones were wiped of texts to clean up for the agency’s bad performance on J6.”
Dan Bongino covered this in his Monday podcast, starting about 11 minutes in. His concern is that the Secret Service “has a culture of failure right now” that’s going to get people killed. He’s also afraid that, given the ease with which evidence of their screw-ups --- or outright malfeasance --- “disappears” or “is purged,” we might never get the real story in either of these cases. Congress should subpoena “every single person in the Tech Department of the Secret Service” and find out where those text messages are. Bongino was adamant: “We are dealing with corruption I’ve never seen before.”
https://bongino.com/ep-2301-
Ah, and one more little thing from Susan Crabtree. Apparently, then-Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle and “others in top agency leadership” (Ron Rowe?) wanted to destroy the cocaine found in the White House last summer, but the forensics people and uniformed cops had their way and preserved the evidence. Preserving evidence: What a concept!
Related: Remember Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide who became a media darling for “testifying” to Pelosi’s J6 Kangaroo Kommittee that Trump was so furious that he wasn’t being taken to the Capitol during the riot that he lunged for the steering wheel of the Presidential limo? I’ve been telling you for years that that’s a physical impossibility in that car. Nevertheless, the story was “too good” for the Trump haters to question, and Hutchinson parlayed it into TV appearances, a book deal and high-paying speaking gigs.
Well, the IG report on that incident is out, complete with interviews with everyone who was present at the time, and guess what? It never happened.
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