The Secret Service has taken a lot of heat lately, most particularly since the July 13th attempt on the life of Donald Trump, who is now the president-elect and, in many ways, acting president. A lot of that heat is justified; on July 13th, they only narrowly missed the disgrace of having lost a principal protectee.
Former Secret Service agent Richard Staropoli is worried that there will be another attempt on the president-elect — and that it may be one that the Secret Service isn’t prepared to counter.
“I’m not highly confident at all. The Secret Service that you see out there today is not the Secret Service of yesteryear. Somewhere along the line they’ve completely dropped the ball. That testimony that you saw today was purely a smokescreen to cover up the shortcomings of a politically compromised agency. It should never have gotten to that point,” Starapoli said. “This whole talk about all these drones and these UAVs, hey, that’s all great, but you need to get back to the basics. What made the Secret Service great was its ability to put human intelligence, manpower on the streets and effectively secure the environment to make it safe for the president of the United States. I don’t see that here.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’d be alone in saying that I certainly can see something happening between now and inauguration day,” he continued. “And it’s not going to be some 20-year-old kid on the roof of a building that’s allowed to get within 100 yards. It’s going to be something of a much bigger magnitude and I don’t think the Secret Service is anywhere equipped to handle that situation.”
Mr. Staropoli may well have a good point.
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Forget home-grown crackpots with rifles for a moment. Imagine if a group backed by the resources of a nation-state, like, say, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, were to decide to take out an American president. They would have manpower and resources far beyond the reach of said home-gown crackpots. Imagine if someone on that July 13th roof had been aiming at Donald Trump, not with a rifle, but with an RPG. No fortuitous turn of the head would have made any difference in that scenario.
I can think of any number of other possible scenarios, but I won’t describe them here. No point in possibly giving any ideas to any goblins who might stumble across this.
The Secret Service seriously needs to step up its game here, assuming they haven’t already started wargaming just such a scenario. They need to start considering the possibility of a military-scaled assault on the president or other senior officials. If anyone thinks I’m being paranoid about that possibility, bear in mind that millions of unknown, unscreened, young, unattached, military-age men have flooded into the country across our wide-open borders, and if they can smuggle in fentanyl and cocaine, they can smuggle in other things.
And they should be considering the likely targets. Joe Biden is probably in little danger. As we used to say about short-timers in the Army, he is so short he can limbo dance under a door and is non compos mentis in any case.
But Donald Trump? That’s a different story.
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