Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on Monday called for a “rethinking” of the methods used to protect former President Trump, in light of a second apparent assassination attempt this weekend.
McCabe said in an interview on CNN that the system in place to protect Trump worked as it should, which he said raises concerns about whether the methods need improving.
“There’s got to be some rethinking of the, sort of, methodology, as they refer to it, that they are using to protect this president under these circumstances,” McCabe said, referring to the Secret Service’s methods.
“The fact that they didn’t know that person was there, and that they were there for as long as they were, raises some real concerns about how they’re thinking about protecting the perimeter at edge of security, which sometimes can come very close to the principal you’re trying to protect,” McCabe continued.
The former president was playing golf Sunday at his course in West Palm Beach, Fla., when Secret Service agents, posted at a few holes nearby, noticed a man with a rifle push the firearm’s muzzle through the perimeter of the course. The rifle was sticking through the bushes 300 yards to 500 yards away.
A Secret Service agent fired at the man, who dropped the AK-47-style rifle and fled in a car. Officials subsequently apprehended the suspect, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh.
He was apprehended before he could inflict harm — a marked improvement over the July assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., which prompted fierce scrutiny of the Secret Service’s failure to protect the president from a bullet grazing his ear.
But phone records place the suspect near the golf course for about 12 hours before the alleged incident, according to federal prosecutors, raising questions about how he went undetected.
“It raises some really important questions for the Secret Service, and they are in a tough spot right now because, coming off of the attack at Butler, they’ve tried to really upgrade their level of protection for the former president and simply to do a better job,” McCabe said. “And it sounds like they did because the system they had in place for yesterday worked the way it was supposed to.”
He said the agents seemed to follow protocol and do everything by the books: “The advance agents found the threat, they eliminated the threat, and they got the president out of danger.
“The problem is,” he said, “the system they had in place was insufficient to identify an attacker with a rifle hiding out, probably, I don’t know, 20 yards from the tee box for the seventh hole.”
