Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien told the Deseret News that Secret Service leadership must be held accountable for not having more agents at the rally where former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated.
O’Brien, who served as Trump’s senior foreign policy adviser from 2019 to 2021, and is expected to play a role in a potential future Trump administration, said the Secret Service agents who put “themselves between the bullets and the president” were “heroes.” But O’Brien said Secret Service leadership “has some answering to do.”
“It’s indisputable that there were not enough Secret Service agents at the rally,” O’Brien said in an interview with the Deseret News on Thursday morning.
On Saturday, July 13, a 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, narrowly missed the former president at a campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania — injuring the upper part of Trump’s right ear and killing one rally attendee while seriously injuring two others.
The attempted assassination of the former president, and now official 2024 Republican Party nominee, set off a wave of questions about how Crooks was able to evade federal and local law enforcement to mount a nearby building and fire off multiple rounds with a rifle before he was killed by Secret Service counter-snipers.
Could Secret Service have done more?
The Department of Homeland Security agency has been under scrutiny as information has emerged revealing that Secret Service snipers knew before shots were fired that someone was on the roof of a warehouse a few hundred feet from the stage where Trump would be standing and that local law enforcement had informed the Secret Service before the rally that they did not have the resources to secure the buildings that Crooks later scaled.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has received multiple calls for her resignation from Republican lawmakers following a Secret Service briefing to senators on Wednesday.
O’Brien questions why there wasn’t a greater effort to station local law enforcement or Secret Service agents surrounding, and on top of, the building the gunman used, as had been done with the buildings behind the stage.
“The (building) that the shooter was on, there should have been a counter-sniper team on top of the roof. There’s no excuse for not having one,” O’Brien said.
There were simply not enough boots on the ground for an event with the former president, according to O’Brien. But that’s not the fault of agents who did their best to protect Trump.
“They did not have adequate security and President Trump’s detail was not big enough,” O’Brien said. “That’s not the responsibility of the agents on the ground. That’s the responsibility of Secret Service leadership.”
If the Secret Service does not have enough “manpower” to bring more agents to Pennsylvania from its headquarters five hours from the site of the rally, then the agency should hire more agents, O’Brien said, which might include asking Congress for more funds.
Turning down the political temperature
Two hours after the assassination attempt against Trump, O’Brien, a Utah resident, and Utah Sen. Mike Lee released a joint statement calling on President Joe Biden to order his Department of Justice to drop all of the charges they were pursuing against Trump and to ask New York and Georgia to drop their respective cases as well.
“Such a gesture would help heal wounds and allow all Americans to take a deep breath and reflect on how we got here,” they said in a post on X.
Trump has been charged with federal election interference; Georgia election interference; falsifying business records in New York, for which he was convicted by a jury in May; and retaining federal classified documents — a case that was dismissed on Monday.
These cases are unprecedented because they target a former president and sometimes employ novel legal theories, according to O’Brien, who previously worked as a litigator. But their harm to the country comes from the fact that legal action against a former president, and current presidential nominee, can be interpreted as “lawfare” by “half of the country.”
“That kind of lawfare creates a lack of trust and lack of faith in the system and if you got rid of it that would go a long way toward a lot of people coming together again and having elections on issues and not on these personality issues and incendiary rhetoric that causes people to do things like what happened in Pennsylvania this past Saturday,” O’Brien said.
Despite an initial statement on July 13 condemning political violence in America and calling for unity, Biden has not done enough to turn down the temperature, O’Brien said.
‘It would have torn the country apart’
O’Brien’s first reaction to the news that Trump had almost been killed was sadness. But he said he wasn’t surprised.
“The left has demonized him so much over the past six years,” O’Brien said. “If you’re a deranged young person, and you think you can be a hero for stopping Hitler and saving America, that’s what this rhetoric leads to.”
O’Brien said he hopes the assassination attempt doesn’t portend a wave of political violence in the United States. The fact that it was unsuccessful may have saved the country from just that, he said.
“America dodged a bullet, not just President Trump,” O’Brien said. And if the bullet had found its mark? “It would have torn the country apart and made it difficult, if not impossible, to stitch it back together.”
It is incumbent on elected officials to “actually do what President Biden asked people to do, to turn down the rhetoric,” O’Brien said, including Trump.
The former president, who is known for his own incendiary rhetoric, will address the Republican National Convention audience on Thursday night. It could be an opportunity for Trump to decrease division in the country after what happened to him, O’Brien said.
“I’m looking forward to his speech tonight and I think it’s going to be a speech that unifies the country,” O’Brien said.