Agent Shot In Reagan Assassination Attempt Says Security At Trump Rally Was 'A Failure'
An ex-Secret Service agent who got shot while shielding former President Ronald Reagan during an assassination attempt in 1981 addressed the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally over the weekend.
In an interview with Chicago outlet WGN-TV on Saturday, retired Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy said that the shooting’s handling by Trump’s security team was “a failure — plain and simple.”
“Any time a protectee is harmed, there’s something that has to change,” McCarthy said. “You have to critically look at what happened, why it happened, and how it can be prevented in the future.”
McCarthy, who retired from the Secret Service in 1993, also compared the assassination attempt on Trump to Reagan’s, saying that it was a “failure too” for the Secret Service because Reagan “was injured.”
According to video footage from the Trump rally shooting, several shots rang off minutes into his speech, prompting him to duck as Secret Service agents came to shield him before taking him off the stage.
Trump sustained an injury to his right ear as a result of the attack, which occurred in Butler, Pennsylvania. One rally attendee was killed, and two others were critically injured. The gunman, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was killed by Secret Service personnel.
McCarthy also spoke about the Trump rally shooting in an interview with New York magazine’s Intelligencer published on Sunday and noted that the agents trying to keep Trump safe probably “would have liked President Trump to have been a little bit more cooperative.”
“He reached out to reassure his followers, the country, and the world that he was OK, so that worked out,” he said, adding, “The obvious question is going to be — it doesn’t take a security expert — to ask why that building wasn’t covered better than it was.”
Despite the assassination attempt, the Secret Service said at a news conference Sunday that it is not changing security plans for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee.
However, law enforcement officials told CBS News that security changes are being made.
Trump is expected to receive the Republican Party’s formal nomination at the convention.
