Incompetence or malice? August 29, 2024Former president Donald Trump raising his fist after getting shot in the ear at a rally. (Twitter Screenshot)(Twitter Screenshot)Incompetence or malice?Why isn’t the ‘news media’ asking the real question: who ordered the hit on President Trump?By Robert Spencer, Frontpage MagazineWho ordered the assassination of Donald Trump?The Secret Service has found its scapegoats. Fox News reported Thursday that “at least five members of the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) have been placed on administrative leave following the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.”This means that “the five are still employed,” drawing your hard-earned money, “but are teleworking and are no longer allowed in the field. They cannot do any investigative work.” That’s good, but it’s not even close to being enough.These five agents are not responsible for the Secret Service’s July 13 debacle.There were just too many inexplicable mistakes, all committed by veteran agents, including the head of the agency — all of whom were Democrats — for this not to have been a set-up.So why isn’t the “news media” asking the real question: who ordered the hit on President Trump?The Secret Service, says Fox, has “concluded internal interviews to understand how Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to fire several shots from the AGR building in Butler,” a building that was so close to Trump that there should have been no question of the Secret Service securing it.Yet Crooks was able to climb onto its roof and shoot at Trump despite being spotted by numerous individuals long before he got off his eight shots.Even worse, “text messages sent by local law enforcement responsible for monitoring the rally flagged Crooks to colleagues as suspicious at least 90 minutes before he opened fire. Despite this, he was still able to shoot at Trump and the crowd.”Crooks should have been spotted before then as well.CBS News reported on July 24 that FBI director Christopher Wray “told members of the House Judiciary Committee that the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, flew a drone near the site of the rally roughly two hours before he opened fire. Wray said investigators recovered the drone in Crooks’ vehicle, and the bureau believes he was watching video streamed from the device to scout the area.”This murderous leftist was flying a drone at the site where the focus of the left’s furious hatred was about to speak, and then ambled onto the site heavily armed, and still the would-be assassin wasn’t stopped.Yet even that is not the end of the Secret Service’s failures on July 13.National Review noted Friday that “another hinderance to the Secret Service’s communications was the poor phone service at the Butler rally, Rowe said. The lack of bandwidth delayed the Secret Service’s deployment of drones, and prevented them from detecting the drone Crooks flew around the perimeter of the rally at roughly 3:51 p.m. on the day of the shooting….Rowe could not explain how Crooks was able to fly his drone but the Secret Service could not, and he expressed regret for the agency’s choice to decline local law enforcement’s offer to fly drones overhead.”Is the Secret Service really that incompetent, or did its top officials want Trump dead?Could it be that Crooks could fly his drone and the Secret Service couldn’t fly theirs because someone powerful wanted Trump’s assassin to be able to do his work without hindrance?In light of that being a valid question, is it even possible for the Secret Service to conduct an adequate investigation?The evidence that the assassination attempt took place with the collusion of its top officials is mounting up.Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Friday “revealed that a Secret Service whistleblower has come forward to claim that officials at Secret Service headquarters encouraged agents in charge of the rally not to request any extra security assets in their formal planning request.”Hawley also noted that “counter-snipers were ultimately approved but only a day before the event and that a separate whistleblower claimed previously that CSD [Counter Sniper Division] personnel would have handcuffed the gunman after he was spotted in the parking lot with a rangefinder.” Yet he wasn’t.Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 30, Acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe admitted that he “cannot defend” the long list of the agency’s July 13 security failures.Yet nearly a month has passed since then, and no one has been fired; there are just a handful agents who are working from home.That doesn’t seem like an agency that is mortified over its abject failure and determined to clean house.The problem that the American people face in asking all these questions is the same one we face in demanding accountability for the crimes and corruption of leading leftist politicians, from Old Joe Biden on down: the people who would hold them accountable are also corrupt leftists, and have no interest in seeing the full truth revealed or justice done.Consequently, we may never know the full story of what happened on July 13.Our only hope is that the Secret Service and the people who are giving it orders are stopped, perhaps on Nov. 5 and in a subsequent housecleaning, before they can do very much more damage. Donald Trump assassination attemptfailuresSecret ServiceThomas Matthew Crooks