In the News

By Tal Kopan and Jim Puzzanghera

WASHINGTON — After the Secret Service foiled Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump — the second in less than two months — there is a growing call to provide the agency with more resources to protect the candidates in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

“One thing I want to make clear is: the service needs more help,” President Biden told eporters Monday. “And I think Congress should respond to their need.”

But with fewer than 50 days left, it’s unclear if there’s enough time before Election Day for help to arrive.

Congress is two weeks away from federal funding running out governmentwide without any clear plan to extend it, let alone to give the Secret Service more money. A House task force created to investigate how a gunman was able to fire a bullet that grazed Trump’s ear in Butler, Pa., in July is making progress but isn’t due to issue its report until December. And even if additional funds were approved, getting it into Secret Service coffers, spent on technology, or to hire and train more agents could take more time than the agency has.

Meanwhile, experts and former officials say the extent of security threats right now is dire, with high political polarization amplified online and by foreign adversaries.

“The nation is facing a threat environment that is highly complex, dynamic and dangerous,” said John Cohen, a two-time former counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security. “It is the most dangerous threat environment that I’ve experienced in the 40-plus years I’ve been working in law enforcement and homeland security. . . . It’s a huge, huge challenge.”

The issue already has Congress’s attention. Last month, it quickly stood up a bipartisan group of lawmakers in response to the attempted assassination. After Sunday’s incident, during which Secret Service agents noticed the barrel of an AK-47 in the bushes at Trump’s golf course and fired shots toward a man who was later captured, the discussion of more resources quickly picked back up.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said Monday that if the Secret Service needs more resources, Democrats are prepared to provide it, possibly in an upcoming short-term government funding bill.

But that is easier said than done.

“A congressional appropriation doesn’t automatically convert into a capable, trained, ready-to-work Secret Service agents or protective division folks, so this is something that’s going to take some time and commitment,” former acting FBI head Andrew McCabe said on CNN.

The Secret Service also saw a more than 9 percent increase in its budget last year, and the agency’s acting director told senators in a letter this month that he does not believe insufficient resources were to blame from the July shooting, according to the news outlet Roll Call.

Acting Secret Service Director Ronald L. Rowe Jr. told reporters in West Palm Beach, Fla., late Monday afternoon that the incident there was a reminder of “the heightened and dynamic threat environment” faced by his agents and the people they protect. He stressed that the alleged gunman’s failure to fire a shot at Trump showed the success of changes put in place after the Pennsylvania assassination attempt.

Rowe said Trump has the “highest levels of protection” from the Secret Service and “if we need to ratchet up additionally, we will.”

He also praised Biden and members of Congress for their the commitment to the Secret Service after decades of the agency having to do “more with less.”

“I feel confident that we will get what we need,” he said.

Security experts and lawmakers had an array of suggestions for the Secret Service, besides more funding, and agreed that foiling the apparent plans of the would-be shooter, who was apprehended later Sunday, is already a sign of improvement in protecting Trump.

Cohen said the service should up its intelligence analysis, work closely with other law enforcement partners at the local and federal level, seek additional funding to support overtime pay, and boost its technology capabilities. The prospect of doing that in two months, he acknowledged, could be summed up in one word: “daunting.”

Representative Mike Waltz, a Florida Republican and a member of the House task force investigating the Pennsylvania assassination attempt, said the agency needs to reassess its staffing to give more protection to the former president.

“I think both the Secret Service and the FBI have to get out of this paradigm of, you get this when you’re the current president, and you get this when you’re a former” president, he told CNN on Monday. " I think that makes sense if maybe you’re Jimmy Carter or [George] W. Bush that, you know, is painting and living a retired life, but it needs to match the threat.”

Waltz spoke before Rowe briefed reporters about Trump’s level of security. Rowe said he would not detail the number of Secret Service agents protecting Trump on Sunday when he made an unscheduled golfing trip, but said “there’s not much difference” in the agency’s footprint at the course now compared to when Trump was in office.

Former Secret Service agent Paul Eckloff, who served on Trump’s protective detail during part of the 2016 campaign and when he was in office, said there appeared to be about the same amount of Secret Service protection for Trump at the golf course, if not more, than there would have been if he were president.

But there’s a need for more, he said.

“I would say they need to move to higher than a presidential level of security at this time,” Eckloff said. “I know that sounds terrifying and it sounds confusing, but they need to look for some out-of-the-box solutions and increase perimeter security everywhere he goes.”

Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Newton Democrat, condemned Sunday’s incident and said he would support providing more resources to the Secret Service “at a moment of heightened political tempers.” But he added that Congress also should take steps to prevent “extremists and would-be mass murderers to access weapons of war.”

“I hope this episode galvanizes the GOP to join Democrats on gun safety legislation, if not for school kids, perhaps they will act to protect Donald Trump,” he said.

But another member of the House task force on the July shooting said that while their investigation is ongoing, it’s clear to her that some things are fixable, like making sure the basics are covered.

“It is complex, but something that is not complex is, are you all communicating?” said Representative Madeleine Dean, a Pennsylvania Democrat. “So some things are going to be very complicated and some things are going to be really clear, that there’s just a communications failure, that there’s a failure to assess the risk in that adjacent property.”

Eckloff and others believed the Secret Service would do whatever it needed to succeed at its mission, with or without more help from Congress.

“During the operational tempo of a campaign year, there’s very little time to stop and even eat or rest, especially in between more congressional inquiries,” Eckloff said. “Briefing Congress on the Hill one more time won’t make former President Trump any safer.”

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