Former Secret Service officials say agents should've kept Trump low, not fist pumping

WASHINGTON − After an assassination attempt on Donald Trump by a sniper on Saturday, he stood tall, gave three fist pumps and yelled "Fight, Fight, Fight!" to the crowd before being moved off the stage by his protective detail.

The instantly iconic image struck many supporters as heroic, and it was admiringly referenced by speakers at the Republican National Convention. There's even a Trump-affiliated $299 commemorative sneaker showing his raised fist, bloody face and the words "Fight, Fight, Fight" underneath.

But Trump's extra few minutes on stage were a serious operational failure by the Secret Service that further endangered the lives of the presidential candidate and the agents protecting him, former Secret Service agents and other experts said.

The standard protocol is to keep the "protectee" − in this case Trump − bent over at the waist, with his head down and his body fully surrounded by agents as he is whisked off the stage, to prevent additional shots from hitting him, according to multiple former Secret Service agents.

“It was absolutely terrible coverage trying to get him out,” said former Secret Service Director John Magaw, who has scrutinized every frame of the videos.

“It should have been faster,” said A.T. Smith, the deputy director of the Secret Service from 2012 to 2015.

The agency is already buffeted by questions about how a sniper was able to climb atop the roof from which he shot the former president, and why it didn't locate him sooner after reports of a man behaving suspiciously.

Former officials say they are not questioning the bravery and integrity of the agents who were there that day, but that the protective detail's performance after the shots were fired did not follow well-established procedures.

Current and former Secret Service officials conceded that the best plans often go awry in the tumult of the moment, especially when the person being protected does something unexpected. And that's what happened after Thomas Matthew Crooks began shooting, winging Trump's right ear and killing one person in the crowd and wounding two others.

Some things did go according to plan. Trump initially dropped down and received immediate help from agents, in keeping with protocol. A rooftop counter-sniper killed Crooks with a single shot. Agents on the ground dove on top of Trump and kept him down on the stage while checking for wounds.

But a USA TODAY analysis of available video, and interviews with experts and current and former Secret Service officials, raised questions about Secret Service actions in the minutes that followed.

'Bend him over, and bum’s rush him'

Some former agency officials said the agents in Trump's protective detail appeared to break with protocol during what's known as the "extraction" process, the critically important effort to evacuate their protectee from follow-on attacks by anyone who might be working with the initial would-be assassin. That kind of one-two punch is so common, including cases where an initial shooter is only a distraction from a more lethal attack, that it's a central part of the training for agents and the protectees themselves, they say.

Smith and other former officials said Secret Service agents are supposed to do whatever is necessary, including a punch to the gut or backwards yank on the belt, to make their protectee double over so their head and torso are enveloped by a phalanx of agents who have pledged to take a bullet for them. Secret Service legend has it that when he was shot in a 1981 assassination attempt, President Ronald Reagan reportedly thought the pain in his ribs was from an agent trying to get him down, not from a bullet fired at close range.

In Trump’s case, after agents raised him up and circled around him as they are trained to do, Trump can be heard saying four separate times, "Let me get my shoes."

Then when they began moving him, Trump appears to stop in his tracks again, looks out into the crowd and, to growing cheers, begins raising his fist and mouthing "Fight" three times.

“The Secret Service training protocols, when they practice this and they have mock assassination attempts, the idea is for the (protective) detail leader or an agent to be able to wrap his hand around the midsection of the protectee and bend him over, and bum’s rush him to either a secure area or into the vehicle” idling nearby, said Smith, who also headed training for the agency during part of his 29-year career.

“That's in a perfect world, and that's what happens in training scenarios,” Smith, who now runs his own global security consulting firm, told USA TODAY.

But Smith, like other current and former Secret Service officials, was loathe to criticize the agents, saying they acted heroically in a chaotic environment with a large and momentarily uncooperative protectee in Donald Trump.

"It's kind of like what Mike Tyson said: Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the head,” Smith said.

“I would agree with that it goes against protocol,” former Secret Service presidential protective detail veteran Keith Gessner, now with Crisis24 PSG, said about the agents’ inability to keep Trump bent down, out of sight and moving fast to safety.

But, Gessner added, “I thought the agents performed as trained and as best they could under the circumstances. There will always be a heightened level of anxiety and confusion.”

Agents in the wrong position and a bad exit route

But there were other complications too, according to USA TODAY’s video analysis and interviews.

Trump lay on the ground for an extended period of time while agents figured out what to do.

Once they got Trump on his feet, the protective circle of agents − the “last line of defense” against a potential second shooter − at times had a gaping hole in it that also exposed Trump’s head and body.

One reason for that was because one of the agents was much shorter than Trump, said Magaw, the former agency director who also headed FEMA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Making things worse, Magaw said: “When they started to move him, they didn't get around him properly, the big ones should have been off on both sides, the smaller (agent) up front because they were turning to the left, and the two bigger guys in back, but they screwed that up.”

And at least one of the agents also exacerbated that vulnerability for Trump by bending down, twice, to retrieve their sunglasses.

“That left his body exposed from the waist up,” Magaw said. As for the agent's sunglasses, “If you lose something, you don't pick it up.”

Some former Secret Service officials also said the evacuation route essentially made Trump a sitting duck. That’s because it was a narrow set of stairs off to the side of the stage instead of a wide exit ramp, preferably out the back, so he could be made to disappear quickly.

“The stairway was only about a fourth as wide as it should be, because you have to be able to get your cover agents and the protectee down those steps all at one time,” Magaw said. “My reaction, as soon as I saw it, before anything happened, was that you’ve got to have a ramp, and it's got to be wider.”

Publicly posted videos show that some agents had to jump off the stage to greet Trump at the bottom of the stairs. Others had to break up their protective circle around him in order to get to him down.

And then there was how Trump reacted.

'He doesn't dictate what happens'

Smith, the former deputy Secret Service director, said the protectees are given specific instructions, and go through training, on how to get down, stay down and do exactly as they are told. President-elect Barack Obama spent more than five hours at the Secret Service's training academy while Smith headed it, he said, going through various emergency scenarios so he would know what to do.

“All the additional stopping, the fist-pumping, the ‘I’ve got to get my shoes,’ you're not only placing yourself at risk, you're placing those agents at risk as well,” said Michael Duffy, a former federal law enforcement agent and founder of the global security firm Solutions Group International that has U.S. government contracts.

“At the end of the day, this is a life-threatening situation and he doesn't dictate what happens," Duffy said of Trump. "It's a security-related matter and those security professionals dictate what happens. He has to go with the program now, he's not in charge anymore.”

Trump grateful to his Secret Service protectors

After the shooting, Trump thanked the Secret Service. In his RNC acceptance speech Thursday, he called the agents "great people" who "put themselves in peril" to protect him.

Sensing the rally crowd's concern after the shooting, Trump told the RNC audience in Milwaukee, "I wanted to do something to let them know I was okay. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting Fight, fight fight!"

His campaign spokesman declined to answer questions about the shooting, including whether the Secret Service – or Trump himself – did anything to delay his evacuation and put him in potential further jeopardy if it turned out there were additional assailants.

“Are you apologizing and making excuses for the assassin? Because that's disgusting if you are,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a text.

More: What went wrong? How did Secret Service allow shooter to get so close to Trump?

Probes looking into ‘all aspects of this’

The FBI has said it believes Crooks acted alone, but experts said it is virtually impossible to definitely conclude that in the moments after a shooting.

Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service spokesman, told USA TODAY that "there is an independent review panel that's going to look at all aspects of this" including the evacuation process.

Amy Westercamp of the United States Secret Service Association , a support group for agents, said she could not respond to questions about whether agents did anything wrong, referring questions to the Secret Service. "We do not comment as an Association on issues related to policy, procedures or operations undertaken by the United States Secret Service," she said.

Video and audio of the event show that the agents on stage encircled Trump and waited to move him until they heard via radio that the shooter, later identified as Crooks, had been killed by their counter-sniper, Magaw and other former agency officials said.

The videos also show the heavily armed Hawkeye counter assault team was in place to eliminate threats before Trump was evacuated.

Smith cautioned against criticizing the agents, or Trump, for what they did in the moments after the shooting, when adrenaline is pumping and chaos is rampant.

“The Secret Service can try and do what it's supposed to do and then the human factor comes into play,” Smith said. “I mean, I understand, the former president's intentions by doing what he did, and they were obviously successful for him. But in terms of that being necessarily textbook, no, it would have been better to move quicker.”

The agents were acutely aware of Trump’s vulnerability while on stage, Smith said: “One agent kept putting his arm and hands up and things like that. So, you know, they were obviously self-aware even then, that to some degree, they're still vulnerable, and they were doing the best they could with that.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Former Secret Service officials say agents should've kept Trump low, not fist pumping