Big Secret Service update; final House Task Force report released
December 12, 2024
With unidentified drones hovering over New Jersey (or as that would be known in Texas, “target practice”) and Secret Service documents on the attempted golf course shooting of President Trump still being withheld, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley says it’s time for the acting Secret Service director to hit the road.
Hawley didn’t mention the catch, but we all know: Trump can’t fire acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe until he takes office on January 20. And the whole agency needs an overhaul. In the meantime, every day between now and Inauguration Day (and after), Trump’s life is at incredible risk.
As reported Tuesday by FOX NEWS, the bipartisan Congressional Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, which investigated both attempts on Trump’s life, confirms the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security has failed yet again, this time to produce documents related to the apparent wannabe Trump assassin who set up camp with an AK-47-style rifle in September on the perimeter of Trump International Golf Course in Florida. The man’s presence there in the bushes was given away only by a flash of light on the muzzle of his gun.
“How is it possible that you have no urgency when you have drones the size of a dining room table flying all over the state of New Jersey and nobody seems to care?” Sean Hannity asked Sen. Hawley on Tuesday night.
Hawley accused the Secret Service of not wanting to cooperate. “They don’t want us to know the facts,” he said. “They’ve stonewalled, they refuse to testify, they refuse to turn over documents…”
He is convinced that Rob Rowe, who was promoted from deputy director after former Director Kim Cheatle’s departure, has got to be relieved from duty.
“I mean, he is not doing his job,” Hawley said. “He endangered the life of the President with his poor response. And for them to stonewall the American people, this many months after not one but two assassination attempts, just like the FBI and the rest are stonewalling us now on these drones over New Jersey --- and who knows where else...that they’re not telling us about? --- it’s time for some accountability at these agencies. It’s time to clean house.”
As for the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, Hawley said they had “whistleblower after whistleblower” come forward to say the Secret Service had failed to secure the buildings, and their claims are confirmed in the House report. It was the same at the golf course, where agents reportedly ignored the protocol of doing a sweep of the perimeter.
“I mean, it’s a miracle Trump is alive,” Sen. Hawley said.
Hannity suggested bringing in Special Forces “to reinforce the good agents that do work for the Secret Service.”
As for the large drones flying over New Jersey, Sen. Hawley said just what we would think, which is to say, “You can’t tell me that they don’t know what that is. I just think they’re not being honest with us. If we don’t know --- if our government really has no idea --- then they’re even more incompetent than I thought.”
“...They need to level with the American people about what’s going on. It’s crazy.”
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6365833152112
The 180-page Task Force report is calling for specific changes to the Secret Service, including possibly moving it from the jurisdiction of Homeland Security, where it has been since DHS was created after 9/11. Before then, it was part of the U.S. Treasury Department, and it still divides its efforts to continue investigating fraud and financial crimes. It also protects foreign dignitaries while they’re in the U.S., with the number of people it’s been tasked with protecting “greatly expanded” in recent years. The Task Force recommends that its array of responsibilities be reviewed so that the agency --- especially during campaign season --- “can prioritize the protection of U.S. leaders and candidates running for office.” Their mission there has to be one of “zero fail.”
One big problem, they say, is that the U.S. General Assembly meets in New York City every September. “The Secret Service’s protective mission is at the core of the agency’s purpose,” they say in their report. “Anything that distracts or diverts resources from the agency’s zero fail mission must be reconsidered.” This year, as it does every four years, the Assembly fell at the height of a presidential election campaign season. (Certainly, this is a factor. We would mention, though, that the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting, which was a total Secret Service disaster and abject humiliation, took place on July 13.)
“Congress, DHS and the USSS [U.S. Secret Service] should jointly consider the protective role the USSS plays for foreign leaders and consider whether such duties can be transferred or abrogated in order to focus on the USSS’s primary duty: to protect the President and other critical U.S. leaders,” the report says.
If you’d like a deep dive, here’s the full, 180-page report.
Fortunately, once Trump gets back to the White House, he can fire anyone he wants to, and if Biden doesn’t like it, he’ll have no one to blame but himself. You see, Democrats’ way of using the most expedient, right-now strategy to get what they want sometimes comes back to bite them, and that happened after former White House press spokesman Sean Spicer was fired from his position on the Board of Visitors to the United States Naval Academy, even though he had a three-year term. When he challenged his firing in court and lost, that decision gave the incoming President legal backing to fire any of Biden’s over 4,000 appointments, immediately. Ha ha.
RELATED TRANSITION NEWS: In quite a stunning development, Trump’s pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, confirms that he was one of over three dozen staffers and two members of Congress whose communications were improperly swept up by the DOJ during the so-called “Russia” investigation in 2017. The DOJ obtained phone records without notifying the courts that the search involved members of Congress or congressional staffers. They were also trying to get their hands on emails from reporters at CNN, the WASHINGTON POST, and THE NEW YORK TIMES. This has just come out in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
Also, there is this: “Another former staffer, Jason Foster, previously told JUST THE NEWS that he confirmed that the government successfully asked a federal court to hide its spying on Congress for five consecutive years.” At the time Foster was being spied on, he was chief investigative counsel for Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
We find this story quite ironic considering that Patel, in early 2018 as chief investigator for then-House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, was the one who discovered the improper surveillance of Carter Page. There was a whole lotta spyin’ goin’ on, and probably still is. That’s one thing Patel is going there to fix.
As Nunes told FOX NEWS Digital, “The feds spied on Kash during the probe and ran information warfare against him, but Kash helped expose them anyway.”
A new piece from Brooke Singman mentions this revelation and also offers a history lesson on Kash Patel as Trump’s perfect pick to head the FBI. It’s not surprising that there’s panic in the swamp over Patel’s installation there in just a little over a month. They’ll try anything to derail his nomination.
RELATED: There’s something else that just needs to end, but it won’t at least for now. That’s the state-level lawfare brought by State Attorney General Letitia James in New York and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia. James says she will not drop the civil fraud case against Trump, the one in which no one doing business with Trump had any problem at all. She’s just sent a letter to Trump’s attorneys to that effect.
And Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is reportedly “laying out alternatives” to dismissing the case against Trump on falsifying business records for payments on a non-disclosure agreement with Stormy Daniels.
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5032679-bragg-trump-hush-money-conviction/
To wrap this up, here’s an amusing postscript to our commentary from yesterday on the need for accountability for members of the Biden administration who broke laws. It’s a brief video montage of new California Sen. Adam Schiff (we feel for you, sane Californians who didn’t vote for him) speaking about whether outgoing officials should be indicted. The comments are from 2018, 2019 and now 2024.
Note that consistency is not his strong suit.