Members of the House Task Force on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump talk about committee’s findings
WASHINGTON (CBS, KYMA/KECY) - Margaret Brennan spoke with two members of the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump on Face the Nation Sunday about the committee's findings about the Secret Service following last week's public hearing.
"I think what we heard from the very beginning the Secret Service, 'This is the worst day of our lives. We're embarrassed by what happened. We're so sorry.' But the other element was local law enforcement that usually would come in and help out. There was very little preparation for the event on July 13, and I think that's what I would say. The lack of preparation, the lack of coordination, and more than anything, the lack of communication on July 13, were some of the biggest things that we looked at. So how did you guys ever imagine that this would work? There's just nothing that makes sense that happened that day."
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), Chairman of the the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump
"I've learned in my time in Congress that, you know, agencies and departments, when they do after action reviews of things that have gone wrong, that they'll often look at the operational and the tactical level of what happened, but they almost never look at the structural level. You know, they don't critique their structure. They won't critique their superiors, the agencies that they're nestled within. They will very often not look at overall resourcing, money because of the politics of making asks like that. And they very rarely ever look at culture, right, because it's just too sensitive for them. So we actually took those areas really seriously. We looked at the Secret Service. Should it be nestled within DHS? Is it structured right? Does it get the resourcing and training? And then the area that I in particular looked at was the culture of the organization, because I was struck by the stories and the recount of the specific actions of officers and agents on the ground that day, and there were some heroic ones, but there were also a lot of examples of people that knew that something was wrong and they didn't say anything, right? So one example of this is the drone operator. So Secret Service has these drone operators, and they literally bought a drone off the market, a commercially available drone, they showed up with this drone in a box. It didn't work, they didn't know how to make it work, so they just put it aside and they didn't have a drone."
Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Ranking Member of the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump
When Brennan asked if they were unaware of vulnerabilities, or if there was a "culture of silence where people speaking up get smacked down for doing so, Crow said in part, "That is my concern, is that there's a culture of silence and that individual officers and agents are not empowered to say something is wrong."
Brennan brought up Acting Director Ronald Rowe testifying Thursday that he thinks "the Secret Service needs to identify leaders earlier on and promote them based on ability, not just hours logged on the clock," to which Kelly said:
"When you look at this, when people talk about, 'We need better leadership,' I was on those grounds the night before, they weren't set up at that point. They were going to work through the night to get it ready...and then you find out afterwards that there was no coordination. There was no team meeting. There was no, this is gonna be your responsibility to know where you're supposed to be and what time you're supposed to be there, you bring local law enforcement in but you don't, you don't include them in the planning or when you do the interviews afterwards. 'Well, I thought he was going to do it.' 'No, we thought somebody else was gonna do it.'"
During her interview with Kelly and Crow, Brennan said they made "three dozen recommendations" on the report on "what to change, including to reduce the number of protectees," which the Secret Service not only protects the presidential leadership, but also their "immediate families, spouses, their children, candidates and anyone really the president delegates," prompting Brennan to ask if all that should continue, to which Kelly and Crow respectively answered saying:
"We've increased the size of protectees that are out there, including foreign assets to come here and people to bring their families and things. So that's gotten so big. But if you look at Homeland, I think, I think when you look at secret services, about 3% of their overall spend, the biggest spend is on FEMA. And when we know we don't want to change anything like that, but you can't have an exclusive without funding them to the level that they need to be funded, not only in manpower and in training, but in the assets that they have to have available to them."
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), Chairman of the the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump
"You always have to ask yourself what are your missions and what is the thing that only you can do? Like what is that no fail mission? In this case with the secret service that no fail mission is to protect our highest level candidates and our highest level elected officials. Period, all the other things, investigation of financial crimes, training and support. These are all secondary missions. So if you're not actually adequately performing any of those missions too standard and if you've reached a breaking point, then it's time to assess what are those missions that need to fall off and to be transitioned elsewhere. That's my view."
Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Ranking Member of the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump
To watch Brennan's full interview with Kelly and Crow, click here.
