Independent review urges Secret Service shake-up after security failures

In a blistering report, an independent panel is calling for an overhaul of the Secret Service. The bipartisan panel was commissioned by President Biden after the July assassination attempt on former President Trump. Amna Nawaz discussed the findings and recommendations with Carol Leonnig, author of “Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service.”

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Amna Nawaz: A bipartisan independent panel is calling for an overhaul of the Secret Service in a blistering new report out today. The panel was commissioned by President Biden after the July assassination attempt on former President Trump, and was comprised of four former senior government officials, including former homeland security leaders Janet Napolitano and Frances Townsend.

For more on the report’s findings and recommendations, we’re joined by Carol Leonnig, investigative reporter at The Washington Post and author of “Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service.”

Carol, welcome back. It’s good to see you.

Carol Leonnig, The Washington Post: Thanks for having me.

Amna Nawaz: Carol, it’s a pretty blunt assessment of the Secret Service failures that led to a gunman being able to take eight shots at former President Trump at that Pennsylvania rally.

In the report, they list an absence of critical thinking, a lack of ownership. Do the findings in this report line up with your reporting on that day?

Carol Leonnig: I have to say I’m pretty proud of the Washington post’s reporting.

My colleagues and I worked on a lot of stories in the hours after 6:00 p.m., roughly 6:11 p.m., on Saturday July 13, trying to understand what had gone so colossally wrong. And this report from this independent panel basically confirms all of our reporting in the days and hours immediately after the assassination attempt and shooting by Thomas Matthew Crooks.

There was no real plan for preventing a person from being able to have a clear line of sight, in essence, a clear shot at Donald Trump from a building only 150 yards away. There were major problems in communications, no ability for the local police to directly tell the Secret Service in a clear and direct way and an instantaneous way that they were chasing a suspicious person and having reports of someone clambering onto a roof with a long gun.

But it is really interesting what else the report and the investigation concluded, this larger pattern of complacency and a lack of critical thinking, and a deeper examination of whether or not the Service really tries to own its problems and fix them and a real concern that they don’t.

Amna Nawaz: Among the recommendations is one that the next director of the Secret Service come from outside the agency.

How big a shift would that be for the Secret Service?

Carol Leonnig: It’s something the Secret Service has resisted for decades. There have been — 10 years ago, nine years ago, when I ran a series — The Washington Post ran a series of stories, investigative pieces that I wrote about huge security breaches, not an assassination attempt, but near-misses and other efforts to kill President Obama.

When we wrote those pieces, an independent panel commissioned by President Obama and a congressional investigative panel both urged outside leadership to shake up the Secret Service at that time. This is not a new recommendation, but there’s a lot of more urgency for it because former President Trump was almost killed.

He came within millimeters of being killed.

Amna Nawaz: Carol, you have long reported on the lack of resources and funding that the Secret Service has been navigating. This one line from the report did stick out.

They wrote: “The failures of July 13 are not primarily tied to budgetary deficiencies at the Service. Put otherwise, even an unlimited budget would not by itself remediate many of the failures of July 13.”

I mean, correct me if I’m wrong. They seem to be calling for a complete cultural overhaul. Is that possible?

Carol Leonnig: It is going to require outside leadership, new eyes, fresh eyes on an agency that, let’s be honest, has a ton of patriots in its fold, a group of people who are willing to give up their Christmas Eves, their wife’s anniversary, their own birthdays to be at the side of the president, the vice president, or the presidential candidate, and secure that person’s life, people that are willing to take a bullet.

But it’s also an agency that has become more interested in covering up problems than in identifying them and fixing them, a culture that doesn’t like to let anybody inside, for fear that somebody will discover how much of a sort of hall of mirrors and smoke it is.

There is a lot of duct tape holding the Secret Service together and a lot of heart on the part of these patriots. And it’s going to require somebody coming in fresh and saying, we need to start over about what we value here at this agency. We don’t just value you being tough and giving every hour you possibly have and sweating through all your clothes and standing in the ice for hours.

We don’t just want that. We also want this other piece, which is a willingness to learn, to use technology and to call out problems, to call them out loud.

Amna Nawaz: That is investigative reporter for The Washington Post Carol Leonnig joining us tonight.

Carol, thank you so much.

Carol Leonnig: Thank you.