Tough Questions Mount for Secret Service

The Secret Service is in for multiple investigations and a long list of questions after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday. The agency has been plunged into its biggest crisis in decades, the Wall Street Journal reports, with one longtime agent likening the attack to the shooting of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and others evoking the shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981. At the same time the Secret Service is investigating the shooting and the 20-year-old suspected gunman, the agency is preparing for the Republican National Convention, which opens Monday in Milwaukee. President Biden said Sunday that he has ordered a review of security arrangements there. The questions being asked include:

• How could a sniper reach a rooftop unnoticed? Just before the gunfire, sources tell the AP that people at the Pennsylvania rally saw a man climbing to the roof of a nearby building and warned local law enforcement officers. One officer climbed up to confront the man, who pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer climbed down the ladder, and the man then shot at Trump. That's when Secret Service snipers killed him, officials said. A witness later said he had seen "the guy move from roof to roof."

• How could he get so close to the stage? An AP analysis of photos and videos shows the rooftop was less than 164 yards from the spot where Trump was speaking. That's close enough for a serviceable marksman to hit a person—and is the same distance at which Army recruits in basic training have to hit a human-size silhouette to qualify with the M16 assault rifle, per the AP.
• Was the area swept before the rally? Ensuring there are no clear sight lines from potential shooter positions to the person being protected is a basic, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said on CNN. The buildings the gunman climbed were outside the principal security perimeter. "When you look at that map, it so clearly points to those buildings that are within it, clearly within shooting range," McCabe said. Former agents said it's routine to check structures outside the security perimeter, per the Journal.
• Was a warning ignored? Members of local law enforcement had seen the gunman acting suspiciously near the event's magnetometers before the rally began. They issued a call on their radios to watch him, which an official told CNN was relayed to the Secret Service.

• Were resource and staffing levels adequate? Biden said Trump already was being provided with heightened security and that he's now told the Secret Service to devote "every resource" to protecting the former president. "The reality is there's just no excuse for the Secret Service to be unable to provide sufficient resources to cover an open rooftop 100 yards away from the site," said Bill Pickle, a former deputy assistant Secret Service director, per the Journal. "And there's no way he should've got those shots off."
• Could it happen again? The issue the nation needs to address goes deeper than staffing, one expert says. "The practical solution will be to increase safety and security protocols until the election, and probably even after," Juliette Kayyem writes in the Atlantic. "But it is misleading to believe that this will eliminate the risk. At best, it will reduce it. That is because the threat now is related to a core American activity: political expression through live campaign events and elections."

(More Trump rally shooting stories.)