The director of the U.S. Secret Service resigned under pressure in the wake of the July assassination attempt on the life of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. But Sen. Richard Blumenthal, speaking in Hartford Thursday, said high-level personnel changes at the agency should run much deeper than that.
“I am calling for a real housecleaning at the upper levels of the Secret Service,” says Blumenthal, “because the brave and dedicated Secret Service agents that are out there deserve it and so do the American people as well as the candidates and officeholders who are being protected.”
Blumenthal spoke after the release of a damning interim report from a Senate committee, which cited a leadership vacuum and a cascade of errors for the agency’s failure to prevent the shooting.
“There was an abject absence of a chain of command: nobody was in charge,” he says.
For example, according to Blumenthal, no one stepped up to halt the event after a suspicious person was seen with a rangefinder: “Nobody took responsibility or command to hold Donald Trump without going on the stage.”
He calls the attack an “accumulation of errors that produced a perfect storm of stunning failure. This assassination attempt was shocking, unacceptable and totally preventable, a tragedy that should have been stopped.”
The report suggests the Secret Service has a long way to go to fix potential blind spots. The Senate committee found that many of the agency’s failures related to the July attack have yet to be addressed.