🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: A Secret Service special agent partially responsible for developing the plan to secure the rally where former President Trump was nearly assassinated is under internal agency investigation for POSTING VIDEOS AND PHOTOS FROM HER PROTECTIVE ASSIGNMENTS TO SOCIAL MEDIA, according to several sources within the Secret Service community.
The female agent served as the official site agent for the July 13 event in Butler, Pennsylvania, that ended in an assassination attempt that nearly killed Trump and the murder of rallygoer Corey Comperatore in front of his family. RealClearPolitics is not naming the agent out of concern for her personal safety,
👉👉An RCP analysis of the Butler rally site agent’s Facebook account found a photo that appears to be taken from Mar-a-Lago looking across the intercoastal waterway.
“A sunset to be grateful for …” the post states, including a heart and sunset emojis and the hashtags “#nofilter #southflorida #thankful #workmode …”
Sources familiar with the videos said most appeared on the agent’s Instagram account, which is marked private.
‼️ Rancor, recriminations, and serious formal misconduct complaints have plagued all levels of the Secret Service detail assigned to protect former President Donald Trump over the last year, distracting the team from its core mission of securing Trump from physical harm and preventing an assassination.
Trump’s regular detail team, a force of 60 employees – special agents and support staff – has been beset by internal division, long workdays and weeks, and constant stress.
👉Last year, the team lost one of its members to suicide.
🚨🚨RealClearPolitics received detailed information about a May 15 all-hands conference call.
The top two leaders of Trump’s detail sternly dressed down the entire 60-member staff in the virtual meeting, announcing formal investigations into what they argued were serious misconduct violations, several sources in the Secret Service with direct knowledge of the online meeting tell RealClearPolitics.
Sean Curran, the detail leader and top boss of Trump’s regular 60-member protective team, and his deputy, Matthew Piant, complained of “rumors, innuendo and toxicity” among the detail, as well as “selfishness and immaturity.”
‼️‼️The top two Trump detail leaders harshly condemned an incident in which a teammate took cellphone photos of two members of the support staff sleeping in a command post while guarding Mar-a-Lago and circulated those to others on the detail.
Matt Piant, the No. 2 on the detail, deemed the prank a betrayal of the team for the purpose of “humor and gossip,” according to detailed accounts. Those encountering the sleeping individuals should have simply held the team members accountable by waking them up with a nudge, he said.
Yet, some rank-and-file members of the detail team familiar with the sleeping incident said the real outrage was that the individuals who fell asleep while guarding Mar-a-Lago were, to their knowledge, were never disciplined. They noted that at least one was the daughter of a retired former Secret Service leader who remained influential among the agency’s top brass.
@2scottsherG @CarmiOnTheVerge Time to clean up your act.
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🚨🚨Re-Upping this story of mine from 2017 that somehow got lost in the reporter frenzy over “Russiagate” — Obama Admin Did Not Publicly Disclose Iran Cyber-Attack During 'Side-Deal' Nuclear Negotiations freebeacon.com/issues/obama-a…
Same “spear-phishing tactic” as the one reportedly used against the Trump campaign.
👉👉State Department officials in the Office of Iranian Affairs on Sept. 24, 2015 sent an email to dozens of outside contractors. The email alerted the contractors that a cyber-attack had occurred and urged them not to open any email from a group of five State Department officials that did not come directly from their official accounts.
"We have received evidence that social media and email accounts are being compromised or subject to phishing messages," the email, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, states. "Please be advised that you should not open any link, download or open an attachment from any e-mail message that uses our names but is not directly from one of our official accounts."
"We appreciate learning of any attempts to use our names or affiliations in this way," stated the email. Shervin Hadjilou, the public diplomacy officer in the Office of Iranian Affairs, sent the email and cc'd four other State Department officials who deal with Iran issues, including one cyber-security expert.state.gov state.gov
While doing initial reporting on the story at the @dcexaminer the year before - in 2016 - I too was hacked by s bizarrely fierce spear-phishing operation. I felt stupid at the time, but it was an extremely deceptive tactic. The Washington Examiner had to give the entire workforce a mandatory tutorial on cyber security afterward. Remember @susanferrechio @DavidDrucker — @alweaver22 were you there yet?
🚨 WHY did the Secret Service COMMAND CENTER not tell its agents to prevent Trump from going on stage?
After reviewing the local Butler-area law enforcement's After-Action Report, (critical timeline attached to this post), it's still unclear to me if they were communicating with the Secret Service command center or a local command center at 5:45 p.m. when they were sending photos of Crooks to a Beaver County ESU group chat, then recommends they alert "command."
If local law enforcement sent the photos to the Secret Service Command Center, there's no way they should have let Trump out on that stage.
‼️One possible reason for letting Trump go on stage, I'm told from a source within the Secret Service community, is that the USSS Command Center is constantly getting flags of suspicious people --even though pics of Crooks were sent to the Secret Service Command Center at around 5:45 p.m., no one had seen a weapon yet -- so Crooks was flagged as a problem but not a "threat."
From a source within the Secret Service community: “A ‘suspicious person’ on the far outer perimeter where 8 cops are looking for him does NOT make me or 99% of agents keep a former or current President off the stage.
If the suspicious person was already on the roof?
“Yes, we hold [Trump].”
🚨🚨Once again, I first broke the Mark Kelly starting a spy balloon company funded by China's TenCent in 2020.
Then I did another story on it 2023 when the spy balloon was traversing the U.S.
Now @FoxNews giving @Axios credit for breaking this story after my THREE stories from 2020 and 2023.
BUT @Axios never got to the heart of the story and mainly bought into Kelly's excuses for it.
The Axios story also never addressed this:
👉The Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) SUSPENDED the process to grant Kelly's company clearance for U.S. defense work. I have the emails from DCSA and I'll attach to this thread.
I've included the three main stories I wrote below.
Back in 2020, The spokesperson for Kelly's balloon company lied to me that they had secured DCSA's seal of approval.
The DCSA aims to protect U.S. security assets from malign foreign influence.
Here's the three stories I broke on in reverse chronology - the latest, in 2023, and then the two stories I first broke in 2020 on the same topic.
Did U.S. Firms Help Propel China's Balloon Fleet? - 2/24/2023
…
Kelly Helped Secure Chinese Tech Giant's Stake in Balloon Firm - 7/9/2020
…
Kelly Silent on Firm's Windfall from Chinese Tech Giant - 5/13/2020
…
Here's a screeen shot of the email I got ack from the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency -- @FoxNews you might want to call or email the agency...
@DCSAgov
1/5🚨🚨 SEN. RON JOHNSON OFFERS INITIAL PRAISE FOR ACTING SECRET SERVICE DIR. ROWE, PROVIDES DETAILS ABOUT WHAT WAS DISCUSSED
.@SenRonJohnson calls his Rowe's morning briefing with senators "forthright," "confidence-building."
Just just got off the phone with Sen. Johnson, who said he was generally "impressed and encouraged" by acting Secret Service Dir. Rowe's briefing his morning.
"He was very forthright, definitely concerned about the morale of the men and women in the service, which I think we all need to be," Johnson told me. "They've got a big task ahead of them, but both he and the FBI Director were really, again, forthright is the best word I can say."
"As I said, this was a confidence-building briefing," Johnson said.
Johnson said he urged Rowe and a top FBI official present to provide more public information so "we don't allow conspiracy theories to spread."
"And I made the point [that] he way to do that is to be open and transparent, hold multiple briefings certainly start out by saying, this is incomplete, it's, preliminary.
"The public cuts you slack, but we need to know things as you know [them], and I think [he] definitely acknowledged that that's a good path to take."
"I think, if his higher ups will allow, I think that's exactly the direction he'd like to take."
2/2 🚨ACTNG SECRET SERVICE DIR. ROWE TELLS SENATORS COUNTER-SNIPER TOOK THE SHOT AS SOON AS HE COULD SEE CROOKS' HEAD, DID NOT WAIT FOR "COMMAND CENTER" PERMISSION.
Instead, a lip of the building was obscuring the shot, and Crooks took two first shots, then ducked beneath the lip, and then popped up for more shots, and that's when the Secret Service counter-sniper shot and killed him.
In my interview with Sen. Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican said he directly asked Secret Service Dir. Rowe if there was ANY delay in when the counter sniper had a shot on Crooks and when he took it because he had to radio back to a USSS command center to get permission.
Johnson told me: "According to him, that's false. ...They had him in sight once he stuck his head up to take the second round of shots.
...They should have told us a long time ago, but from my standpoint, that's the most important thing I learned from the briefing -- it was in response to my question.
More specifics in response to my follow-up question to break down exactly why the CS could not see Crooks:
So there is on [these metal roofs,] at the peak, there's a piece of metal up there. He didn't describe exactly, you know, how high. But when they had somebody [up there crawling then] crouch down, you could only just see the very crown of their head, so you couldn't see the rest of the body.
So, I mean, if you're a sniper, you're scanning things, you might see a dark spot, but not even recognize his head, I suppose... So he was not all that visible, but apparently, he came up above that metal partition, fired off two shots, sinked down below it, then came back up in the exact same location to fire the second round of shots when they took their shot.
So he wasn't in their sights for, you know, minutes, or, you know, even seconds. I mean, [as] soon as they got him in the sights, they basically took the shot. So again, I think that's news.
3/5 🚨🚨WHY DID THE SECRET SERVICE AGENTS NEAR THE STAGE NOT WHISK TRUMP AWAY WHEN LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENTS ALERTED THE COMMAND CENTER AND WERE LOOKING FOR CROOKS AND RALLYGOERS WERE POINTING TO HIM ON A ROOF?
Apparently, acting Secret Service Dir. Rowe has no good answer to that question from senators.
According to Sen. Johnson, Rowe told senators that Secret Service agents responsible for not ordering the president off the stage would be subject to "disciplinary action."
Johnson in an interview with me: The acting director, basically, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, [said] that basically he can't, he can't defend what happened.
I think they'll investigate, and [it's] entirely possible that people will be subjected to disciplinary measures. There's a pretty broad range of what that may be...you could tell he was emotionally concerned about it because he had just been to [Butler.]
I could not defend it.
He was highly concerned about the ongoing morale of the Secret Service after this. He's got, they've got enormous challenges ahead, and he needs the agents to have high morale, because they've got a lot of long hours ahead of them.
Again, I view that as a very good leadership quality. He's coming in as acting director. He recognizes that immediately as a concern of his agency. He needs to boost the morale of Secret Service agents. I would like to see that happen as well."
Photo of new Acting Secret Service Dir. Ron Rowe, below.
MUST-READ content of this online petition calling on Kimberly Cheatle to resign. ‼️ "Executive leadership bonuses" ‼️ cited as a reason the Secret Service is having manpower shortages and inadequate training, among a litany of reasons.
Also, THIS 👉 "instances of fraud, waste, and abuse regarding the Secret Service's selective promotion practices under Director Cheatle's leadership are also being swept under the rug."
"The current promotion practice is arguably not in keeping with the Merit Promotion Process (MPP), in which millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent perpetuating the Agency's false narrative that promotions are based on a 'merit based system,' when in reality the promotions have been based on alleged "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)". This has been most recently demonstrated earlier this year by the fast track promotion of a female agent (with only 7 years of employment - too junior to qualify as a WHIP or Lead) who hadn't completed the standard phase 2 protection time required for promotion. This agent also benefited from the 30x30 pledge and is now a supervisor over more senior agents at the New York Field Office."
Take a look at this: "At a time when the Secret Service is dealing with manpower shortages due to attrition, there have also been a number of recent Secret Service incidents indicative of inadequate training, no doubt correlated to the fact that the Agency is struggling with an insufficient training budget to incorporate much needed for mock up sets for realistic simulated exercises (i.e. White House, Fence Line, etc). Agency sources attribute the issue to budgeted training funds allegedly being reallocated for recruitment, promotional testing, and executive leadership bonuses.
Any anonymous online petition calling for Secret Servcie Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign (which now has more than 10,000 signatures) says a female agent with a history of performance issues made "harassment" allegations against her superior in response to a poor performance evaluation. The source then says "agency executive leaders [i.e. Cheatle and other top brass] turned a blind eye to the "blatant misconduct" -- the female agent was illegally secretly audio-taping supervisors, and the source said the same agent was suspected of secretly audio-taping Presidents Obama and Trump while on the job protecting them.
"Executive Leadership resisted taking appropriate investigative or disciplinary action, until one of her supervisors filed a whistle blower complaint which eventually resulted in disciplinary action being taken against her," the anonymous petition states.
My latest compilation of reporting: GOP Was Investigating Secret Service Before Assassination Attempt | RealClearPolitics realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/…
🚨New info from a source in the Secret Service community — Trump’s usual protective Secret Service detail was worked so hard (working 7 days a week with no days off) that many of agents assigned Saturday were temporary replacements from different field offices.
This is not the usual protocol for sitting presidents and vice presidents but “typical” for former presidents, (although no former presidents have run again in modern history.)
“Trump has a permanent detail, however it’s much smaller in the amount of bodies,” the source said. “His detail has been worked so hard with all the travel that they’re working 7 days a week with shift changes. so HQ sends in temp agents to supplement - not a good scenario. Mission Failure, IMHO.”
🚨 (cont.) I’m told the only permanent agent from trump’s detail during the rally was SAIC (Special Agent In Charge) Kern, two sources within the Secret Service community told me. All others were temps. Pittsburgh USSS Field Office had a Jill Biden visit and designated a lot of resources to her, the source said. Also - the advance work only occurred one-day beforehand bc of a lack of resources.
Where were the resources?
The Pittsburgh USSS Field Office had a Jill Biden visit and designated a lot of resources to her.
“That is f—-ing unbelievable to me,” the source remarked.