Whistleblowers have informed Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., that Secret Service personnel are “woefully unprepared” and receive inadequate training for effectively protecting candidates, including former President Trump. Hawley discussed these concerns on “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Tuesday, revealing that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents, when reassigned to protective details, were provided with only a two-hour webinar on Microsoft Teams for training. According to the whistleblowers, these training videos were pre-recorded and plagued with technical issues, Fox News reported.
“Imagine 1,000 people logging onto Microsoft Teams at the same time after being informed at the last minute that everyone needed to login individually,” one whistleblower told Hawley. “Once it got rolling, the Secret Service instructor couldn’t figure out how to get the audio working on the prerecorded videos [which I’m told are the same videos as last year]. All told, they restarted the videos approximately six times …. The content was not helpful.”
The Secret Service responded with a statement noting that the agency “respects the role of oversight. To date, we have provided over 1,500 pages of responsive documentation to Congress and have made employees available for transcribed interviews. These efforts will continue as our desire to learn from this failure and ensure that it never happens again is unwavering.”
The whistleblowers claimed that the two-hour webinars have not been updated since the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13. “Nothing new, nothing improved since the assassination attempt on former President Trump,” one whistleblower told Hawley. Meanwhile, other HSI agents who worked the fateful July 13 Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, told the Missouri Republican’s office that they “only receive[d] one PowerPoint presentation for training.” Hawley criticized the government agency for its mishandling of the assassination attempt, calling it a “nightmare” for the nation.
The allegations about inadequate training and preparation for HSI agents come in the wake of ongoing discussions between Hawley’s office and whistleblowers regarding the Trump rally shooting. The conversations focus on how Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin, was able to access the AGR building rooftop with an AR-15 rifle that evening, Fox noted further. Hawley’s office has previously criticized the lead site agent, describing him as “inexperienced” and “incompetent.”
“The site agent, the lead agent, was known to the Trump campaign to be inexperienced, to be ineffectual, to be, frankly, incompetent at their job,” Hawley previously said in an interview on “Jesse Watters Primetime.” “I’m also told by whistleblowers that on that day, she was not enforcing the normal security protocols. She was not checking people’s IDs. She did not use Secret Service agents,” he added. “Most of the agents there that day were not Secret Service agents. They were Homeland Security agents.”
WATCH:
The agency has taken disciplinary action against five agents from the 60-member detail assigned to Trump’s Butler, Pa., detail, reports noted last month. The suspensions of the five agents seem to be a direct response to the pressures faced by Acting Director Robert Rowe to implement accountability. According to separate sources, multiple agents from the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh Field Office have been placed on administrative leave. This move highlights the urgency for Acting Director Robert Rowe to demonstrate control and reassure lawmakers following the resignation of now-former Director Kimberly Cheatle.
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