‘That Is A Leadership Issue’: Peter Welch Sounds Off On Secret Service Failures After Trump Shooting

4 months ago

During a joint hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday, Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) questioned officials about the Trump assassination attempt.

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00:00Thank you very much. First of all, thank you both for the tremendous work you do,

00:07and for all the folks behind you and under you, so thank you for that.

00:11I kind of want to follow up a little bit on Senator Cotton. There's three issues that have

00:16been raised. One is the selection of who gets protection, and you've addressed that just now.

00:23The other is whether it's a budget issue, which I don't necessarily think it is.

00:29But then there's the operational question.

00:33Was this an operational failure? It appears to me that's where the focus should be.

00:39One of the issues on the operations is the capacity of people who are part of the team,

00:46both Secret Service and also the local law enforcement, their capacity to act on what

00:53they see. This is what Senator Cotton, I think, was talking about with Common Sense.

00:58You mentioned that the sniper was authorized immediately to act. He wasn't checking in with

01:05anyone, and he took out the shooter as quickly as he could. But according to the timeline,

01:13you had local law enforcement capture two photographs of the shooter at 510. At 532,

01:23local law enforcement officers spot a suspicious person who turned out to be the shooter with a

01:28phone and a range finder. At 546, the alert was so significant that snipers text photo of

01:38the shooter from where he was initially spotted to the USS lead sniper. I mean, how is it that

01:46where you had these experienced law enforcement people who understood the gravity of the

01:51responsibility of protecting the presidential candidate, the former president, none of these

01:59actionable observations resulted in action? I'll direct that first to you, Deputy Director Abate.

02:09Thank you, Senator. From the FBI standpoint, we're simply collecting the facts. We've interviewed

02:17most of the officers. Now we'll end up interviewing all of them.

02:20Okay, we'll go to Acting Director Rowe.

02:26So on that, Senator, I think there was a sense of this guy is standing out, and that's why he

02:31came to the attention of local law enforcement. No, I get that. That's my point. He did stand out.

02:37Correct. But nothing happened. I mean, there were alerts, but there was like,

02:44you've got somebody suspicious. Why didn't somebody go interact with the suspicious person,

02:49right away? And they were attempting to locate him. I can't answer that question as to why,

02:55if they took a picture of him and they thought he was unusual, suspicious, not acting normal,

03:02why there wasn't, and I think, again, there was probably an assumption on the part of that

03:08officer that took that picture that, oh, some uniform or somebody will go eventually and walk

03:14up to this. Well, see, that's what seems like an operational failure. Somebody else will do it. So

03:20is the responsibility of an officer to alert some other officer that they think somebody

03:27might be suspicious, or the first officer who sees a suspicious person can take the next step

03:34to actually engage that person, or talk to someone very, very close to it and say,

03:40engage that person? And this guy was wandering around for quite a while.

03:45He was. I can't put myself in the mind of that officer.

03:48I'm not asking you to do that. I'm asking, this is operationally. How does the process work? Okay?

03:56So that is the job of the leaders, as opposed to the officers. Are they empowered to act

04:04immediately upon the observation of someone who looks very suspicious, particularly when they've

04:09got the range finder, they're in a place where it really wasn't about seeing the rally. It was,

04:17as we see, it was a place where you get a good view of former President Trump. I mean, that is

04:23a leadership issue, right? So, Senator, that officer didn't work for me. That was a state

04:28and local officer that made that observation, took that picture. So I can tell you from the

04:34Secret Service perspective, and we do this routinely, is that when people come to our

04:40attention, we locate them, we go up, we do a field interview, or we try to do a consensual encounter.

04:45That's the operational thing I'm talking about. If you do it within Secret Service,

04:49you all are in charge. And you are relying on local law enforcement assets. Those folks,

04:57and they did their job here, up to a point, where they identified this person,

05:03passed information along, but nobody acted. The empowerment to that local officer, I would think,

05:09has to come, be transmitted through the Secret Service, maybe in the earlier briefings. But,

05:15you know, where you say, you know, folks, you see somebody suspicious, you engage that suspicious

05:21person. I don't disagree, Senator. And it goes back to my comments at the beginning of the

05:25hearing that we need to be very direct to our local law enforcement counterparts so that they

05:30understand exactly what their expectations. I yield back. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

05:35Thank you. Senator Tillis, you're recognized for your question.

‘That Is A Leadership Issue’: Peter Welch Sounds Off On Secret Service Failures After Trump Shooting

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