A retired Secret Service agent said the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was a “failure” by the U.S. secret service that will need to be reviewed internally to determine what, if anything, could have been done differently.
“A tragedy was narrowly avoided and we’re going to have to figure out how it happened,” retired Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy told NBC 5 Investigates on Sunday.
McCarthy, a former police chief in the south suburb of Orland Park, is familiar with the realities of protecting a president.
While in the Secret Service, he was shot in the chest during an assassination attempt on former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
He said the incident helped usher in the era of more widespread use of metal detectors.
McCarthy said what you saw on stage Saturday was Secret Service agents moving “quickly” to cover former President Trump after he was punched in the ear, but he acknowledged there may have been a security breach that will need to be investigated.
“It appears that the agents assigned to former President Trump responded quickly, quickly covered him as soon as they heard the sound of the shooter, and then they transported him to the armored car and got him to medical care,” McCarthy said. “So they were successful, but they’re going to have to review what was done. And maybe everything that could have been done was done, but there’s going to have to be answers about how this person got on top of that building.”
When asked if he thought it was a security breach, he said:
“It may or may not have been a failure. I have not heard yet what was done to secure the file. But when a Secret Service protégé is injured, there is a failure somewhere, because that is not supposed to happen,” McCarthy said. “A human failure, another guy … who knows what happened, but it is a failure nonetheless. The assassination attempt on Reagan was a failure because he was injured. That is also a failure and we are going to have to look at what failed.”
McCarthy told NBC 5 Investigates that the Secret Service’s security procedures for this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and next month’s Democratic National Convention in August could likely be revisited, but he doubts major changes will occur because both events are indoor events, which are somewhat easier to secure than outdoor gatherings — like the one held Saturday in western Pennsylvania.
He said the secret service trains for just such situations. He said he could not say how often, but added:
“It was regular training. We practice attacking the president, the protégé. We use blanks at the academy, stun grenades to simulate explosives, knives, etc. We train for that. We take cover and evacuate if the attacker is far away and we go towards the attacker according to what is called the “arm’s reach” theory – if he is within arm’s reach with a weapon. So we operate on the basis of two theories. It’s both.”
