The Secret Service is investigating how a gunman who shot and injured Trump was able to get so close

[TomCADem]

65. Exactly. Trump Demanded Secret Service Lower Security For His Supporters

This incident brings to mind how Trump has repeatedly ignored and disparaged the Secret Service's efforts to keep him safe. For example, Trump wanted to be right in the thick of efforts by his supporters to engage in an insurrection, but the Secret Service did not think that placing the President in a violent insurrection would be safe.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/secret-service-repeatedly-defied-trumps-orders-on-january-6.html

Months after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump began publicly insisting he would’ve joined the rioters himself if it hadn’t been for those pesky Secret Service agents. “I said I was going to go down with the crowd. But they wouldn’t let me go,” he told journalist David Drucker in May 2021. “I think if I did go down there, I would have stopped the people from doing anything bad.”

While this initially sounded like an empty boast to assure his most ardent supporters he sure would’ve liked to have been by their side as they assaulted Congress on his behalf, it now seems at least partially true. In this summer’s most explosive House January 6 committee hearing testimony, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top White House aide, said she was told Trump tussled with a Secret Service agent in the presidential SUV, trying to grab the steering wheel himself when he was told it wasn’t safe to head to the Capitol with his supporters.

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The Post reports that, in other internal emails, agents said Trump was angry about agents keeping him from the Capitol, suggesting that he didn’t accept their rationale for returning to the White House once it became clear the protest had turned into a riot.

The new revelations come from more than a million pages of records the Secret Service turned over to the House committee after drawing heavy criticism for deleting agents’ text messages from January 6, 2021. They will likely revive the debate over whether the agency has the authority to override the president’s decision to put his life at risk — though, in this case, “the agents were wrong for all the right reasons,” as Jonathan Turley put it in an opinion piece for The Hill. Trump may have been telling the truth about his desire to join his supporters at the Capitol, but it’s still hard to see how his presence there on January 6 would have “stopped the people from doing anything bad.”