Secretive Service
Plus: Harris clinching nomination, Trump appealing N.Y. civil fraud judgment, and more...
Secret Service had one job: A week and a half ago, an assassin attempted to shoot former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and missed his head by a few millimeters, grazing his ear. Yesterday, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability to answer for the agency's shocking ineptitude.
"The director declined to answer questions about how the security perimeter was drawn for the rally, whether law enforcement swept the roof in advance or how many agents were assigned to the event, saying a review of the breakdown is ongoing," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Cheatle acknowledged that [gunman Thomas Matthew] Crooks was identified as suspicious, with a range finder—which resembles binoculars that hunters use to measure distance to a target—and backpack, more than an hour before he opened fire at Trump's rally. Pressed by lawmakers, she acknowledged that Secret Service agents had received multiple notifications of a person acting suspiciously."
But Cheatle could not answer questions like "Did the Secret Service have an agent on top of that roof?" and "Why was the roof left open?" choosing instead to deflect and to point to a report that will be issued some 60 days from now. There was very little gleaned from the hearing, attracting bipartisan scorn and leading Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) to call Cheatle "full of shit" at one point. "We haven't gotten a single document or piece of information or data from you or your agency in [relation] to the rally, that we have asked you for," added Mace.
At times, lawmakers pressed for answers as to how the agency missed something so major, failing to communicate with local law enforcement and failing to realize that the reported suspicious person was in fact a massive threat. Team Trump had apparently even asked the Secret Service for more security leading up to the rally, a request the agency denied.
Sixty days until a report, 100 days until an election: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) was surprisingly sharp throughout: With elections happening in 100 days, "the notion of a report coming out in 60 days, when the threat environment is so high in the United States, irrespective of party, is not acceptable," she argued. It's been 10 days since the assassination attempt, she noted. A report in 60 days' time simply doesn't cut it.
At other times, lawmakers went full culture war, with Rep. Glenn Grothman (R–Wis.) at one point asking Cheatle: "Could you elaborate why you want one-third of the Secret Service to be women?" Cheatle denied that she wanted this, but Grothman appears to have done his homework.
"I'm very conscious as I sit in this chair now, of making sure that we need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everybody in our workforce, and particularly women," Cheatle said in a television interview with CBS News in 2023. She "aims to have 30% female recruits by 2030," the news organization reported at the time.
Pretty much all of the federal law enforcement agencies—the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Capitol Police, and the U.S. Marshals Service—have signed onto a similar pledge, which aims to up the number of women in police recruit classes by 2030.
Of course, having lady cops, or aspiring to have lady cops, isn't necessarily the reason for the Secret Service's failures. That's a cheap Republican talking point that keeps being trotted out these days: Every time there's an issue with airplane mechanics, for example, a chorus of people says Boeing is obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring over safety. Another member of Congress, Tim Burchett (R–Tenn.), told Cheatle (a woman): "You are a DEI horror story."
The fixation on DEI is a little stupid but also not totally wrong. Focusing on meeting arbitrary diversity quotas versus hiring based on merit is a foolish way to run an organization. You will not have the best, most suitable people on the job; you will water down the overall quality and bear the consequences. "They're replenishing the force with agents that would have never made it in my day," a former Secret Service agent told National Review.
In the absence of other explanations and concrete information as to how the Secret Service failed to such a degree, of course grandstanding politicians fill the void with DEI critiques. This is unsurprising. Perhaps Cheatle should take seriously their quest for answers, and appreciate the urgency with which they speak.
Kamala Harris will probably clinch the nomination: Following President Joe Biden's announcement that he will be stepping aside and suspending his reelection campaign, Democrats have eschewed an open convention in favor of essentially coronating Vice President Kamala Harris as their nominee.
No other Democrats have risen up to challenge her, and Harris has, as of last night, secured pledges of support from 2,668 delegates, clearing the 1,976-delegate threshold, which means she will be able to formally secure the nomination in the first round of voting in early August.
"Hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type," said Harris, visiting her new campaign headquarters and making a speech to staffers about how she, as a former prosecutor, knows how to go after "fraudsters" and "predators."
Harris initially garnered support from Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was initially a holdout, possibly leaving room for the possibility of an open and competitive nominating process. But yesterday, Pelosi threw an endorsement Harris' way as well, as did six major Democratic governors: Illinois' J.B. Pritzker, Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer, Maryland's Wes Moore, Minnesota's Tim Walz, Kentucky's Andy Beshear, and Wisconsin's Tony Evers.
Truth be told, Democrats would probably have been better off anticipating Biden's age becoming a liability and taking their primary process more seriously earlier in the race. Now, they would probably also be better served by opening the nominating process up to more candidates, and holding a late-in-the-game miniature primary in order to field the best possible Trump challenger. They could attempt to do what used to be historically quite common (from 1831 to 1968, in fact): Pick a nominee at the actual convention, that place where you're kind of supposed to be doing that anyways.
Scenes from New York: "Lawyers for Donald J. Trump filed an appeal on Monday evening seeking to dismiss or drastically reduce the $454 million judgment levied against him this year in a New York civil fraud case, the latest maneuver in the former president's multiple legal battles," reports The New York Times.
QUICK HITS
- How Erewhon won over all the hotties and became a cult sensation.
- "The 'far right' smear just doesn't work anymore," argues journalist Melissa Chen in a media criticism post on X.
- OpenResearch, a nonprofit research lab funded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, "found that when it gave some of the poorest Americans $1,000 a month for three years with no strings attached, they put much of the money toward basic needs such as food, housing, and transportation," reports Wired. "But what amounted to $36,000 wasn't enough to significantly improve their physical well-being or long-term financial health, researchers concluded." Some allege that news organizations are covering the universal basic income study results poorly, though, colored by their own biases:
Consensus among academics is that results of the OpenResearch UBI study were between mixed and disappointing. Yet most articles in the popular press (Forbes, Bloomberg, Vox, NPR, Quartz) characterize the results in a positive tone and ignore or bury the null/negative results.…
— John Arnold (@JohnArnoldFndtn) July 22, 2024
