The Crisis Within the Secret Service

It has been six weeks since the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the American public’s questions about the nature of the attack and the security failings that led to Trump’s brush with death largely go unanswered.

Jason Chaffetz, a Fox News contributor and former Utah Congressman who once chaired the House Oversight Committee, joined The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss the apparent security failures and ongoing investigations into what transpired in Butler on July 13.

“I thought the extraction was very slow. I thought it was fairly pathetic,” Chaffetz told The Daily Signal. “It’s been illuminated more now that even though he was the Republican nominee, even though he was the former president, he wasn’t getting the full protective detail that a sitting president would get. And I have a problem with that.”

Chaffetz believes the failures are structural. Poor recruitment and training, as well as heavy workloads create a perfect storm for the kinds of security lapses witnessed on July 13 in Butler, Chaffetz suggested. These problems have long plagued the Secret Service. When Chaffetz chaired the House Oversight Committee, he conducted the largest investigation into the Secret Service’s operations in American history. The investigation resulted in a more than 400 page report titled, “United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis.”

The former Utah Congressman remains “skeptical” that the current investigations in Congress will yield the policy changes necessary to improve the Secret Service without Congress using the power of the purse to “hold them accountable.”

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