Tag: secret service

The Reality of the Bipartisan Task Force Investigation into Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump

The Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump Final Report. Sounds impressive. A Task Force. Like Storming a beachhead or cracking down on organized crime. Unfortunately, in the case of this Congressional committee, the American People did not get its money’s worth.

In fact, after months of “investigating” the result of those efforts consists of what the People already knew…the Secret Service did an extremely lousy job of protecting the then former President.

Do the People know why the alleged shooter attacked the then former President? No. Do the People know what physical evidence was collected to determine who was the alleged shooter? You know like DNA, fingerprints, photographs? Nope.

Did the Congressional Task Force interview the parents of the alleged shooter to determine what the family may have known about the shooting event, or did it bother to have a conversation with the alleged shooter’s employer?

You know an employer who had a recent photo of the alleged shooter and not some insulting High School photo. No. Neither of those interviews happened.

But the Task Force did provide the American People one hell of a photo op when its members took a day trip to Butler Pennsylvania to get a firsthand look at the rally venue and stand on the roof of the AGR building. How impressive. But was it worth the expense when the Task Force only came away with the Secret Service didn’t do its job?

AbleChild has been following the investigations associated with the attempted assassination in Butler, PA, and held some hope that that Task Force might provide some much-needed answers. Unfortunately, the Task Force Final Report leaves much to be desired so AbleChild must continue to ask the obvious questions.

For example, on Page 24 of the Final Report it is acknowledged that “at approximately 1:30p.m. Crooks’ father gave him the rifle that would later be used in the assassination attempt. The firearm was legally transferred to Crooks by his father the year prior.

Crooks told his father that he was going to the local gun range…” It seems obvious to ask if the father legally transferred the weapon to his son the prior year, why would the father have to give him the weapon?

Seriously, why would the son have to ask for the gun if he owned it for a year and, according to Senator Grassley’s report, the alleged shooter used it all the time at the local gun range?

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The US Secret Service (USSS) agent that took shots at Ryan Routh, the second alleged would-be assassin of now-President-elect Donald Trump, reportedly missed six times from around five feet away from Routh. The alarming failure of the agent comes as the USSS has come under higher scrutiny since the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting and attempted assassination of Trump.

Routh, who was positioned around 300-500 yards away from Trump on his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, was taken into custody earlier in the fall after USSS spotted him in the bushes with a rifle. After USSS agents took the shots at him, he ran off and was later arrested and charged in the alleged assassination attempt.

The report from the task force said that on September 15, there was an agent “riding along the fence line” of the golf course and then “noticed an individual by the fence line on the external perimeter.”

“The agent first noticed the suspect, later identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, and then noticed the barrel of Routh’s gun sticking through the fence line. The special agent, who may have been as close as five feet away from Routh, immediately responded by firing shots toward the suspect. It is believed six shots in total were fired; however, final ballistics are pending an ongoing FBI investigation,” the report added.

Routh then fled from the scene to his “pre-positioned vehicle” the report adds. “A bystander who, according to the Secret Service, heard the shots and witnessed Routh running to his vehicle, snapped a photo of Routh’s license plate and provided it to one of the Secret Service special agents,” it continued.

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The House Assassination task force released its final and longawait report on Tuesday.

The 180-page report claims the deadly shooting at Donald Trump‘s Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13 was ‘preventable and should not have happened.’

It was released just days after its final public meeting last week where Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe got into a screaming match with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas).

Rowe did acknowledge at the hearing the agency’s ‘abject failure’ in the July shooting.

The 13-member panel was created by a House vote shortly after the first assassination attempt over the summer. And a few months later they were asked to also look into the second incident.

The group concluded that there was no single failure that allowed shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks to fire at Trump, but ‘various’ decisions and moments that created an ideal situation for the assassination attempt.

The Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump released a series of recommendations it feels will help prevent future incidents.

Members of the task force visited both sites where men tried to take out the former – and now future – president.

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