Secret Service
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The Secret Service is the U.S. agency charged with protecting the president, and in Kiriakou's framing its only job is to protect the candidate, nothing else. John Kiriakou, who worked alongside it for 35 years, describes a culture that is "great with guns" but complacent, over-reliant on technology and lax on training.

Follow-up failures

As an example of poor follow-up he cites his friend Michael Maroulis, founder of the Service's intelligence office, who personally visited a prolific letter-writer, Sara Jane Moore; reassured she would not act, he let it go, and two weeks later she tried to shoot President Ford. Kiriakou also notes the Colombia scandal in which agents on an advance trip hired prostitutes and refused to pay.

Butler, 2024

Kiriakou calls the unguarded, sloped roof at the 2024 Trump rally the agency's worst failure since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, and holds that the easiest explanation is the best one at that stage: a colossal, historic screw-up by the Secret Service. He knows the ground personally, he grew up walking distance from the Butler County fairgrounds and farm show and never missed a year as a child, because there is nothing else to do in Western Pennsylvania and politicians always come to those events. The venue was not novel, and the Service should have been used to it.

What was reported afterwards was that coverage of the buildings outside the immediate perimeter had essentially been outsourced to the Butler County sheriff's department, something Kiriakou says the Secret Service would literally never do. Correct practice, in his account and that of a former FBI agent he compared notes with, is to sweep every building within a perimeter that encloses everything with line of sight to the candidate, keep sweeping it, and put someone on every single roof. Drones had been supplementing human perimeter surveillance for at least a decade at installations such as Bagram Airbase, where layered perimeters were watched by two, three or four aircraft with a monitor inside, and at Butler there was no drone coverage at all.

Local police and the Service are also not on a shared radio net. In most cases an officer who spots a shooter radios his own dispatch, that dispatcher liaises with the Secret Service, and the Secret Service dispatcher then reaches the agents, time lost at every hop, on an event that may last only an hour.

The historical pattern makes the lapse harder to explain. Two major assassinations in 1968, the shooting and wounding of George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland in 1972 while he ran for president on the American Party ticket, and the grievous wounding of Ronald Reagan in 1981 each produced what the agency calls a top-to-bottom review of its procedures. From 1981 to that Saturday there had been no credible attempt on a candidate's life, and then a twenty-year-old climbed to a roof in direct line of sight of a former president, stayed there some time, was confronted at least twice, and still got a shot off.

Kiriakou treats it as a standing-procedure problem rather than one bad afternoon. He was with his twenty-year-old son when the news broke, and his son described a NASCAR event in North Carolina four weeks earlier where Trump was guest of honour, standing on a balcony above the press area in a crowd of some fifty thousand, the only person wearing a red hat, with no security check and no metal detector to get in, "if somebody wanted to kill Trump ... this would be like fish in a barrel."

The Venezuelan embassy

Kiriakou has also faced the Service from the other side. Speaking at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington in April 2019, during the occupation by the Embassy Protection Collective, he opened by inviting the Secret Service officers posted outside to come in, and closed by telling the crowd that they would have to fight the Secret Service, because he knew in his bones the agency was planning something grossly illegal and a terrible violation of international law.

On the night the embassy was ordered closed, leaving with most of the others while some elected to stay inside, he overheard two uniformed Secret Service officers talking. One asked who these people were. The other answered that the ones outside were with us and the ones inside were with Putin; when the first chuckled, the second said "no, seriously, it's like with Trump." Kiriakou's reading is that the instinctive reaction, that the two were simpletons, is the wrong one: they had been exposed to the unrelenting reporting that Donald Trump was a Russian agent for so long that they meant it.

See also

- Sara Jane Moore
- Butler rally shooting
- Venezuelan embassy (2019)
- Permanent wartime economy
