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Okay, I'd really like TheMotte to talk me down from crazy-town and conspiracy-ville.
Exhibit A: Secret Service was warned of an Iranian (or Iran-backed) assassination threat against Trump (Source)
Which means that the Saturday shooting represents a high-water mark in Trump's security detail.
Exhibit B: Secret Service snipers spotted Thomas Crooks in position on the roof 20 minutes before the assassination attempt. (Source) Per the article's timeline:
Which means the Secret Service knew there was an active threat, 10 minutes before they allowed Trump to take the stage. This is separate from the 2-minute 'crowd pointing at guy with gun on roof' warning where the Secret Service failed to move Trump off the stage.
Exhibit C: Secret Service has stated that 'local police' were supposed to be responsible for covering the American Glass Research (AGR) building. However, both the county (Source) and city police (Source) have denied that they were so assigned.
Apparently, there were local police -- including snipers -- inside an adjacent or conjoined building in the complex (Source), but no one's been identified as responsible for the building itself or the roof itself. I've heard unsourced rumors that a SWAT team was supposed to be assigned to the specific roof the shooter used, but instead congregated within the building due to the heat (Source) but there's been no confirmation.
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I know my Hanlon's Razor:
However, at this point I'm gaining an appreciation for Grey's Law:
If the wildest conspiracy theories and worst nightmares were true, if US Secret Service did deliberately set out to create a hole in Trump's security to allow him to be assassinated... what would they have done differently? How much more could the USSS have f***ed up their protection before we'd be comfortable drawing a line between 'smoke' and 'fire'?
And if Hanlon's Razor does bears out and it was in fact merely incompetence... then we apparently live in a world where this is the best the US Secret Service can do while on high alert, actively preparing to defend their protectee against an Iranian-backed assassination attempt. Which leads me to wonder, how vulnerable are the rest of US leadership to enemy agents?
If there are this many layers of "they dropped you on your head as a baby, didn't they?" when the Secret Service has direct warning of a major threat, what the hell kind of protection does the President have, or the Vice-President, or any of the other notable names with a USSS detail?
If the US Secret Service was 'security theater' in the same vein as the TSA, what happens when the curtain is pulled back and everyone sees that the Wizard of Oz is just a sad little man in a booth? Should we expect to see more -- and more successful -- assassination attempts with actual muscle behind them in the near future?
And why in the name of all that is holy does Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle still have a job?!
A sudden surge in personnel could cause exactly the kind of organisational chaos that allows for gaps in oversight, especially when multiple organisations are involved.
To me, at least from the outside perspective, the organizational chaos is the big unreported story. It appears that the cops were given some autonomy in how they guarded that building without having to tell the USSS what they were actually doing there. Which not only opens up the roof as a vantage point, but creates chaos exactly where it could have been lethal — until they confirmed that the guy on the roof wasn’t a cop in a t-shirt acting on orders, they can’t just assume the guy on the roof isn’t a cop. So they’re trying to get in contact with every unit near the building to find out. That takes too much time.
What should have happens that they should’ve put any locals directly under the command of one USSS agent, no one deviates from the plan without clearing it first or at least telling the central command. Then you plan for everything within gunshot range, putting someone at every access point and on the roofs. But also removing the delays necessary when you don’t know who’s doing what and thus have to waste precious time trying to contact every independent agency involved to make sure it’s not one of their guys.
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I think mismanaging a sudden surge in personnel could cause that kind of organizational chaos, but the cause would be the mismanagement, not the surge in personnel. Everyone knows that a sudden surge in personnel, especially when multiple organizations are involved, is likely to be messy and cause unforeseen complications. Thus anyone in charge of such a situation has the responsibility to account for that chaos by preventing it, mitigating it, circumventing it, etc. So all this explanation would do is to raise the question of how/why the director of the Secret Service behaved so incompetently as to allow this kind of organizational chaos to occur. Perfection is impossible, but the level of failure that occurred here isn't in the realm of "they just can't reach the impossible standard of perfection" and closer to "it'd be difficult to make the failure look more intentional if you'd tried."
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