Secret Service Has ‘Culture of Deception,’ Jason Chaffetz Warns

Bradley Devlin / September 01, 2024

Jason Chaffetz, who formerly investigated the Secret Service during his time in the House, shares what he thinks needs to be done to get answers after the shooting of President Trump. “They know what happened at this point, and they’re not being candid about what has happened,” Chaffetz says of the Secret Service. Read the lightly edited transcript below.

Bradley Devlin: I’m Bradley Devlin, the politics editor for The Daily Signal. And today I’ll be talking to Jason Chaffetz.

Now, you might know Jason as a Fox News contributor, but before that, he served as the congressman from Utah’s 3rd District and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee. During his time in Congress, he led the largest investigation into the Secret Service in the nation’s history. …

Joining me now to discuss the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and the fallout from the Secret Service is Jason Chaffetz. Jason, thank you for joining the show.

Jason Chaffetz: Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Devlin: So first, we just glance right over the fact that there was an attempt on the former president’s life. Take me back to that day, July 13. Where were you when you heard about it? Did you see it live? And what did you think when you saw the president’s near brush with death?

Chaffetz: Well, I was actually at Fox News. I was going to host the show that was supposed to come on at the conclusion of President Trump’s remarks. And as we were sitting there watching the TV, we had gotten all ready, we’re getting ready to go sit down in the studio. All of a sudden, something happened and the president was down.

And when it was happening in real time, it was obvious that he had gotten hit. And it wasn’t so clear that he was getting back up. And when he did get up and he raised that fist up, I still got goosebumps in this, like, “Oh, my gosh, but is he really going to be OK?” Sometimes somebody who’s shot, you don’t know the severity of it. And the extraction seemed to take a long time.

And then I just went right up at Fox to be ready to talk about it. And I think I was the first guest on the air to try to talk about it in real time with just watching the pictures like everybody else was watching.

Devlin: So, we see that footage, incredibly powerful footage to be sure. But you have an added eye, let’s say, for these types of operations. From a security operations perspective, when you saw that footage for the first time, was there anything that immediately stood out to you?

Chaffetz: I thought the extraction was very slow, I thought it was fairly pathetic. And I noticed that immediately because in the back of my mind, I know that we had done this investigation where they were supposed to—the training was near zero. I mean, literally around zero. And it just became evident.

And even on first glance, you see agents unable to holster their gun. Undoubtedly they’re nervous, it’s the heat of the moment. But then you also wondering, were shots fired? Were there multiple shots fired? Where were they fired from? So, lots of thoughts running through your mind. And then, were there other people hit?

And then all of a sudden, you had … this lady screaming. And it was obvious there was also loss of life there, and that was devastating. But the big question was, that went on for a while, is he dead? Is he alive? Was he hit in the head? But boy, amazing that he got up and he was talking about he wanted to get his shoe back, for goodness sake. Right?

Devlin: That’s right.

Chaffetz: I mean, it was only Donald Trump, a very inspirational and iconic moment.

Devlin: It was about two hours of heavy hearts for the American people as they waited to figure out if President Trump was OK. But incredibly quickly after that, we knew that Congress was going to be looking into this. And we knew that there was something off, something bizarre about this whole incident. Sen. Ron Johnson from Wisconsin really solidified that when he released some findings from an investigated conducted by his office on July 21.

And here’s some top lines from that brief. “Secret Service did not attend a security briefing provided to local special weapons and tactics, SWAT and sniper teams the morning of July 13th, 2024. Local law enforcement notified command about Crooks, the shooter, prior to the shooting, and received information that Secret Service was aware of the notification. And Secret Service was initially not going to send snipers to the rally, according to law enforcement.”

I mean, does this sound like standard operating procedures for what the Secret Service should be doing? Or what is the alternative?

Chaffetz: Yeah, I think the key word there is should, because they were in a posture that—it’s been illuminated more now, that even though he was the Republican nominee, even though he was the former president, he wasn’t getting the full protective detail that a sitting president would get. And I have a problem with that. And it obviously was not adequate. It was a complete failure in mission, which is a zero-failure mission.

And now, look, there were agents that did their job and did it exceptionally well, and heroically got there and were willing to take a bullet for the president. But when it became evident that it was somebody on a roof able to get a shot in close proximity—how? Why? You got to be kidding me.

Then the video started primarily on X, started coming out really quickly, that people had seen the shooter. Homeland Security takes this position of see something, say something. Well, people were saying stuff. They were saying it to the local police, they were saying it to the Secret Service.

And yet this person who was not terribly creative, who was not stealthy, didn’t come up with some new thing that we hadn’t seen before—he’s wearing camo on a white roof. And to be able to actually hit the president, if not for him turning his head at the last second, I mean, he would be dead right now. And this country would be in such turmoil. There’s so many things that are wrong with this scene.

And then to have the Secret Service go silent. What other time do we have a disaster in our country where the Feds or even the locals just don’t say anything? And the Secret Service didn’t do a press conference that day. That is so irresponsible. They left it up to the FBI, who misled us. We don’t know the name of the shooter, but we know he is a 20-year-old male. How do you know he’s a 20-year-old male if you don’t know the name? And then they said there’s no ongoing threat. How do you know there’s no ongoing threat? You just told us you don’t even know his name.

I mean, those were warning signs of things that I had seen in the past where the Secret Service had a culture of deception and misleading the American people to the truth. And I think that’s continued through today.

Devlin: There is the culture of deception, but there’s also the structural issues with the Secret Service. I think a lot of Americans think of the Secret Service as an institutionalized version of the president’s bodyguard, which it is in a lot of ways. But they don’t realize that Secret Service agents are positioned all over the country.

And clearly, there were failures of communication, as laid out previously by Sen. Ron Johnson, between not only local law enforcement but within the Secret Service. Right? Folks coming in from Washington, D.C., agents there already on the ground. Talk about some of those logistical issues that the Secret Service faces.

Chaffetz: I think when we get through this investigation, my guess is while you’re going to have some human error, there are going to be five key things that we walk away with. No. 1, you’re going to find that recruitment of agents and officers is a problem. No. 2, the training, once they become, is totally inadequate. And if you’re there for years, the amount of training you’re getting is well below any standard that is acceptable.

Workload is off the charts, incredibly high. The average officer, which is the Uniform Division, will work more than 560 hours per year over time. And that’s an incredible workload for them to take on. And that’s in part because the recruitment is so low and the attrition level is so high that they’re short more than a thousand people. And then you get into technology problems, communications problems.

And part of the issue here is they have up more than 150 offices throughout the country. So, if you’re in the Secret Service, you might be in Seattle or Salt Lake City or Phoenix Arizona, or you name the city, there’s probably an office. Or there’s a bigger one in Miami, for instance. The problem is, there isn’t a President Trump coming through or a Vice President [Kamala] Harris coming through or Donald Trump Jr. coming through on a regular basis. But in a presidential year, they think it’s a surprise. Every four years, all of a sudden there’s people coming through.

Most of the Secret Service agents are working on financial issues. They are set up to deal with credit card fraud, they’re set up to deal with currency problems, currency fraud, counterfeit money. And so, you’re working in, say, Seattle, and then all of a sudden Kamala Harris shows up. Guess what? You take off that hat and then you suddenly are in the protective detail, and you haven’t been trained up for it.

And I think what you’re going to find is that there in Pittsburgh, that field office was overwhelmed, because there are these swing states. And if you’re working in Michigan or Pennsylvania or Ohio or Nevada, you’re just getting overwhelmed and overworked. And the reliance on the locals, locals will do everything you want them to do, but you don’t have time to get them up to speed about the protocols.

If you recall, when President Trump was shot, agents jumped up. And then it took a little bit, but then you had somebody come up. And they were in full uniform with their gun, they walk across the front of the stage. Normally that CAT team, as they’re called, normally, there’s a lot more of them. But you notice two people. That is far short of a full team that would normally be in position to help the president and put down an attacker. What if there were six attackers? We got lucky in that there was only one, and he was unsophisticated and he was taken out so quickly. But these are all problems, and I think it really does fall back into those five buckets.

Devlin: And we still don’t have most of these questions answered, of course.

Chaffetz: No.

Devlin: Right? The attempt on Trump’s life happens July 13. Congress goes out of session for the next week for the [Republican National Convention], where senators are chasing down the Secret Service director.

Chaffetz: Great video.

Devlin: She resigns in disgrace. Yeah, hilarious. But then Congress comes back the following week, and then they’re out of session for six weeks. We already knew something was bizarre here. Something strange happened in Butler, Pennsylvania. But instead, Republicans go on vacation for six weeks because they need to raise money from donors in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

If you are in the House and you are the speaker or you are in House leadership, you control the calendar. Why weren’t Republicans doing more about this, saying, “We just had an assassination attempt on the former president’s life. We’re not going on vacation until we have more answers here.”?

Chaffetz: Well, pretty quickly, they had hearings. But remember, and you heard Sen. Johnson from Wisconsin talking about this, there was a very thorough list of questions they need answered. James Comer put together, the chairman of Oversight Committee, the committee I used to oversee, put together a very thorough list. They need the names of the agents there. They need a lot of these details, of which Homeland Security is not coughing up.

And I can tell you, having done investigations, if I don’t know who I can interview or who was on the team last night, or who are those snipers, I’m paralyzed in my ability to do it. So, as you heard Sen. Johnson just in the last couple of days saying, “They’re stonewalling us. They’re not giving us the information.”

Devlin: How is that possible?

Chaffetz: Because Congress, this happens time to time again, not just Secret Service. I’m talking broadly. Congress does not use the most powerful tool that it has, which is the power of the purse. They don’t hold them accountable and they don’t stand up for themselves. They’re good at issuing letters, they’re good at doing press conferences, but they’re not very good at actually drilling down and making sure those agencies come up.

Why didn’t they call Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas? He’s the secretary of homeland security. He is the one in charge of the Secret Service. Instead, what you had was, remember, you had a Secret Service director that was willing to do an interview for television but wasn’t willing, initially, to answer our Congress’ questions. And then that’s when she famously said, “Well, we didn’t have an agent up on the roof because the pitch of the roof. It was too … ” I mean, it was a flat roof, essentially.

Devlin: I was there. The roofs that the snipers were on were more sloped than the roof that Crooks was on.

Chaffetz: Exactly. So, she’s misleading there. And then when they did have the hearing, I guess what bothered me, and I told James Comer this afterward, I think I would’ve, I was right on the verge of, if I was there, holding her in contempt. You’re under oath, you’re there under subpoena. If you know the answer to the question, you’d answer it. It’s not, “Well, I really don’t want to tell you that.”

Imagine if our judiciary worked like that. Imagine if all of Congress worked like that. “Well, I’m only going to give you the answers that make me look good.” That’s not the way it works, folks. If you know the answer and you’re not willing to tell it under oath, under subpoena, you get held in contempt. That should be the consequence, but they didn’t do that.

Devlin: And it really makes you think about the structure of government we currently live under. Right? We say that we live in a republic, but now we have federal agencies who should be under the purview of the president, who should be answered to the people’s representatives in Congress, willfully not giving over information, doing this all the time. This is such a common tactic in Washington, especially with the intelligence agencies or agencies that have intelligence functions. Right?

Are Republicans acting a little bit out of fear here? I know we think of the Secret Service as the bodyguard, but there is an intelligence aspect to the agency, too. Are Republicans acting in fear of what the Secret Service might do?

Chaffetz: I don’t know that it’s fear. I mean, look, when I was the chairman, we had the No. 2 person at Secret Service say, “Hey, it’s time to even the playing field with Jason Chaffetz,” because I was asking tough questions. And they sent 42 agents to dive into my background to try to come up with something nefarious that I had done.

Devlin: And the best that they could get was you once applied to be a Secret Service agent.

Chaffetz: Yeah, that’s it. That’s all they got. So, I got the political enema. But it shows how they act and how cavalier they were in their attitude.

Look, there’s some serious players. Sen. Johnson’s very serious about this. Sen. [Chuck] Grassley has been a superstar on this. I think [Reps.] James Comer and Jim Jordan do a wonderful job on this. I think the speaker needs to be pushed a little bit harder. You have to do this, as painful it is.

But the problem is, at The Heritage Foundation, there were some panels today that came out and talked about, there was a review in 1995. There was one done, I think, in 2005. I did probably the most thorough one that was done in 2015. And yet the same fundamental challenges that I talked about, recruitment, training, workload technology, and communication, those five issues continue to plague the agency. And they’re understaffed by more than a thousand agents. And then we have another incident.

When I did my investigation, 400-plus pages, you can find it on the internet, you’re going to find that we looked at more than 150 security incidents. These happened regularly. At the time, we were doing fence jumping and shots fired at President [Joe] Biden’s vice presidential home. We had shots fired at the White House. Nobody caught, nobody apprehended, nobody identified. So, these are problems that continue to plague the agency. Remember all the fence jumpers? I mean, that was an embarrassment, right?

And so, you have to hire and bring somebody in from the outside. That was the No. 1 recommendation by Jeh Johnson, the homeland security secretary. And guess what? That’s not what Joe Biden did. Joe Biden hired somebody who had worked for his security detail. That’s how we got [Kimberly] Cheatle, Director Cheatle.

Devlin: I’m glad that you brought up the information warfare that the Secret Service engaged in when you were investigating it. A quote from The New York Times report back in 2015 from Assistant Director Edward Lowery said, he said in a message, “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out.” I mean, what is that? Take us behind the curtain. I mean, these agencies operate in this way all the time. Highly territorial, secretive, subversive, even, to the will of the people.

Chaffetz: To put 42 agents to go out and find something in my background to embarrass a chairman because he’s asking questions, you would think somebody would be held in consequence. Nobody was fired, nobody was let go. Some people got paid time off. I call that a vacation. There were no serious consequences. It’s that combative.

And they just fundamentally forget who they work for. They work for the people and members of Congress are representatives of the people. So, it’s an attitude adjustment that needs to happen, particularly with the Secret Service. They want to be secret. They don’t want anybody looking over their shoulder.

And when you start to looking at what was happening overseas on some of these trips and prostitutes and all that, I don’t want to disparage all these people, but there were some really bad activities going on. And they should have been held accountable and should have been fired. But almost nobody gets fired. And it’s certainly in this case, a president is shot. They got a couple of people now that are on administrative work duties, but nobody’s been fired yet. And it’s been weeks and weeks. They know what happened at this point, and they’re not being candid about what has happened.

Devlin: Yeah, we’re stress testing the Secret Service right now, and that’s a dangerous game to play. Speaker Mike Johnson and [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries have agreed to form a bipartisan task force to lead the congressional investigation into what happened in Butler. They say it’s going to have subpoena powers. But the old saying in Washington, which I know that you probably know, is, if you want to do nothing, form a committee.

Chaffetz: Yeah.

Devlin: Does that hold with this committee? Or are you optimistic about the revelations and recommendations that this committee can make?

Chaffetz: I’m skeptical in that I think it’s going to come back to those same five buckets, hopefully with more specificity. But how could you not do it? On the other hand, I think you have to do it. I’m glad to see it bipartisan. When I did my report, it was very bipartisan. So, this is one area of Washington D.C. where I think you can look legitimately and say, “This has been a bipartisan effort.” In fact, going back to the hearing with Director Cheatle, I actually thought that the Democrats asked, in many ways, better questions than the Republicans did.

Devlin: Well, that’ll do it. Thank you, Jason, for coming on and shedding light on what is really—

Chaffetz: Appreciate it.

Devlin: … going on behind the Secret Service and with this assassination attempt.

Chaffetz: Got to get it. We got to get it right.

Devlin: We do. We have to get it right. And hopefully people will come back from vacation rested and ready to investigate, because that’s our hope.

Chaffetz: Very good. Thanks for having me.