West Michigan's Morning News
Investigating the Donald Trump Assassination Attempt
And this is West Michigan's morning news. Steve Kelly, Brett Bakeda with a couple of days off. Tony Brooks is back and following that assassination attempt on Saturday joining us on the live line. Former Secret Service agent Jason Russell, who's previously provided security protection for several U.S. presidents now with secure environment consultants. Jason, thanks for joining us again today. Yeah, thanks for having me. As somebody who has been trained in a situation like we all saw play out on Saturday and now see recorded and played back, let's start with where you think things went wrong. How could something like this happen? Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, one of the things we say at Secret Service is if the guns have to come out, obviously, there was a mistake made somewhere, right? Or there was a weakness somewhere that we didn't catch. I think the issue in this situation was you had an outside event, right, where they could only control so much of the perimeter. The more of the larger you make the perimeter, the more weak kind of your security is because you can't really control a large perimeter like that. So I think unfortunately, what you had was kind of a perfect set of circumstances for an attacker. He was, I would guess, out of visibility for the snipers on kind of the downslope side of the roof and was able to get to the top of that roof. It is rightful over the top and get off a few shots before they were able to identify him. So, you know, the Secret Service is really good about identifying weaknesses like that and adjusting. We've had to do it before with situations like obviously the Kennedy assassination and what happened with around Reagan. So they'll be taking a really deep in-depth look at this and adjusting to make sure it doesn't happen again. I guess the takeaway is it hasn't happened at least as far as an attempt is concerned since 1981. But that being said, obviously there are things that we're not supposed to know about this sort of thing. But the guy was like a football field in a half away and was still able to get away a shot that actually hit the president. I mean, do you say we're blessed that it didn't or we've just got to do better? Well, I think honestly a mixture of both. I mean, the Secret Service doesn't have the ability to go and encompass people's private property into their perimeter. So if you have a house or if you have a building that's adjoining a venue where you actually do have the, you know, you do have the right to control it, you have to use other assets to control that. So there's news coming out now that they did have a police officer stationed over there who actually went up and identified this shooter was up there. But for some reason, came back down the ladder and then started to communicate. But then the gentleman was able to get off the shot. I mean, I think, you know, like you said, Steve, there's thousands of protective visits from between 1981 and today. There's probably been several hundred thousand protective visits. The Secret Service is doing this 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And when you have a zero fail mission, like the Secret Service has, obviously, you know, you can have hundreds of thousands of missions to go perfectly and one that doesn't. And that's the one that everybody's obviously going to focus on. But, you know, luckily, former President Trump wasn't hurt. Unfortunately, a bystander, you know, did lose his life. And this will be examined in depth. There's really good documentation kept on everything the Secret Service does. But there will be nothing that will go unanswered in this event. Boy, once that shot went off, though, and to the things that went right, those agents appeared to just come out of the floor. I mean, my gosh, their response was quick after the shot. Yeah, I mean, that's really the that's, you know, what you train for every day. I always say, you know, I've been saying to everybody, I hope that I would have been as brave as those agents were to really put themselves between the bullets and the person they're protecting and did a really nice job of making sure he was covered and got plans to get them out of there. So that was definitely done extremely well. Jason Russell is with secure environment consultants and is a former Secret Service agent. Thank you for your service and for your time this morning.