Investigative journalist Gerald Posner — whose deeply researched studies of the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. made him a preeminent authority on political assassinations — says he can understand why so many people think there’s “something fishy” about the official story of the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.
Noting the belated admission by the Secret Service that Trump’s security team was denied requested resources before the July 13 assassination attempt, Posner asks, “Did they refuse to give Trump extra security for a two-year period?” They were almost creating a situation in which somebody could take a shot. Now I’m not saying that’s the case, but I understand why that speculation would be there.”
Posner lays out his analysis of the events in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left one man dead, seriously injured two others and wounded former President Trump in the most recent episode of the Drill Down podcast with Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers.
Posner has been following the hearings into the Secret Service’s failure, and he has many questions. “We knew there have been screw-ups before, but they can’t keep it silent anymore because people who attend the rally take out their cell phones and start recording what happened. Everybody could see — ‘Hey, there he is! There’s that guy! Look at that guy on the roof! Hey, officers!’ — So, we know more than they are telling us. No wonder we think something is fishy here.”
Before the event, the shooter “was walking around with a range finder and apparently a large backpack and they were tracking him. And then the Secret Service was made aware, they’re saying they now knew 30 minutes in advance,” Posner says. “Why did they allow Trump to take that stage?”
Posner has written thirteen books, including deeply researched reviews of the slayings of President John F. Kennedy, called “Case Closed,” and “Killing the Dream,” about civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King. He and his co-author wife Patricia carefully reviewed the records around both assassinations, concluding that both Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray acted alone.
The new Acting Director of the U.S. Secret Service, Ronald Rowe, called the assassination attempt against former President Trump “a failure of the Secret Service,” not of local law enforcement. He spoke to a joint Senate hearing this week investigating how 20-year-old Thomas Michael Crooks, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, was able to get so close to Trump and fire eight shots, despite spectators clearly shouting to police they could see the shooter on a roof near Trump’s platform.
“It’s a massive failure of communications,” Posner tells the hosts. “We don’t know yet if the shooter had anybody else working with him. We’ll find that out. Was he encouraged by others to go ahead and do it? Did he have any assistance?” Posner asks.
There were enormous procedural failures, too. “There is a water tower there, by the way. I’ve looked at this in close detail. It gives 360-degree coverage of the entire area. Somebody could have been posted on that water tower. That had been discussed and, evidently, not done,” he says. “One of the things we’ve now learned is that the Secret Service never had a meeting with the local police or state police before this event took place. Was that common practice in the last couple of years on other security matters? Or was this particular for this event, or particular for Trump?”
Worse is that the service has already said it erased the radio communications from its archive as their “standard operating procedure.”
Schweizer notes that the cascade of Secret Service failures might begin to seem to some like a “directed incompetence.” Posner recalls the revelations that key high-level FBI officials held personal animus toward Trump during his presidency, and asks, “Will we find personal emails or possibly even, you know, government emails from secret service officials that say, I can’t stand that no good ex -president, you know, I really don’t like him at all?”
After watching the testimony of both Rowe and former director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned in disgrace last week after her appearance before a House of Representatives panel, it’s easy for the public to conclude that “we know more [about the situation] than they are telling us.”
After Schweizer and Eggers share FBI Director Christopher Wray’s offhanded remark during his own testimony that “there’s some question” as to whether Trump was hit by a bullet or by shrapnel,” Posner agrees that “you can understand why people are suspicious.”
These hearings “were a master class in how not to disclose information if you’re a bureaucrat,” Posner tells the hosts. “The whole system went into paralysis.”
Posner is not inclined to conspiracy theories, because “I never underestimate the ability of the highest levels of the government to be incompetent.” Still, he thinks the Service’s use of close protection agents a full head shorter than Trump raises obvious questions about service priorities. “What would we be doing today if the fatal headshot to President Trump had happened while he was being led to the car to be taken away and the shot was possible because he wasn’t protected by agents all around him?” he asks. “We would be thinking that that was an absolute setup and a conspiracy.”
Americans are used to hearing quickly from government officials immediately after catastrophic events such as airplane crashes and hurricanes, so stonewalling and ignorance displayed by the highest levels of the Secret Service, even in front of Congress, shocks many people. “Government agencies fight to hide the information that is most embarrassing to them,” Posner notes.
Worse, the service’s former director told Congress last week that USSS routinely deletes its radio recordings after events. Apparently, there was no order from senior officials to preserve the radio communications during such a security failure.
“There was testimony [Tuesday] that the protocol and the standard operating procedure for the Secret Service is never to retain communications on these remote sites when they cover rallies or events for a candidate. That there was nothing unusual about the fact that they did not retain the communications,” he says.
“False,” Posner insisted.
“There should be orders coming down from headquarters that say, ‘Delete nothing. Make sure that everything is kept.’ That’s because you’re going to want that data to go over yourself to determine what happened, whether there were shortcomings, and what to fix in the future. The fact that it was deleted as some ‘standard operating procedure’ is not a satisfactory answer.”
Posner compares the concentration of the Butler shooter, who got off eight aimed shots even after crowd members told police they could see him on the roof, to Oswald: “Oswald had just turned 24 years old the month before Kennedy’s motorcade went in front of the place where he worked. He’s never seen a presidential motorcade before. And when he finally sees it come into view, and Jackie is there, and the governor of Texas, it becomes real, and he misses on the first shot. The second shot isn’t fatal. He has to stay with the motorcade, not panic, not move, not run away for the final headshot,” he says.
“Crooks, the 20-year-old shooter (in Butler), is on the roof and he can hear people. He has to hear people shouting down on the ground for a couple of minutes beforehand — ‘There he is! I see him, officer!’ And he could have easily panicked… What does he then do? He manages not just to get off a shot, but eight shots, which is remarkable. And no one on Secret Service communications says, ‘Gun! Gun! Gun!’ Their response is slower than any of us would have wanted it to be,” he says.
How does the Secret Service of today compare with what he researched from the Kennedy days? Has it improved or deteriorated? Are government policies like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” affecting its ability to perform its mission?
“It sort of gets lost within the amorphous security apparatus of Homeland Security. It’s got a $3.1 billion dollar budget. About a third of it is used for protection details, although there are more people to cover because we have more living ex-presidents than ever before. But at the same time, it seems to me that there is a DEI component to this that needs to be investigated. So, I can’t say to you today, ‘yes, it’s because they set a standard that they want 30% women [agents], or they decided they want 15% agents of color.’
But, as an investigative journalist, “we all have our bias when we go into something. The real hard part, as a journalist, is if you find something that’s the opposite of what you originally thought, to go with that. My own bias is that DEI played some factor in what I call the decline of the quality of the Secret Service over the years. But now I need to look into that and see if that’s really the case,” Posner concluded.
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