'That Doesn't Cut It': Mike Lee Assails Secret Service Over Attempted Assassination Of Donald Trump

2 months ago

At a Senate Republican press briefing on Tuesday, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) spoke about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

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Transcript

00:00All right.

00:01Mike Lee's next.

00:05The late Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. used to say that there's a point

00:09of contact in every case, and he defined that point as the place where the boy got his finger

00:14caught in the machinery.

00:17Comparing that statement here, we might say it's a point of failure.

00:21Where are the points of failure that the Secret Service should have acknowledged?

00:28Where are the points of failure that after 17 days since this assassination attempt,

00:35the Secret Service still hasn't even answered the most basic questions?

00:40Let's look at what some of those were.

00:43First of all, why on earth did they ever let Donald Trump take the stage?

00:48He'd already been identified as a suspicious person, a suspicious person who had entered

00:52with a range finder, something that one doesn't normally bring to a political rally.

00:59They otherwise regarded him as suspicious.

01:01They had taken photos of him.

01:02They had sent those things along to the Secret Service.

01:07Why on earth did they not remove President Trump from the stage after spectators and

01:13local law enforcement assigned to help protect the president had noticed that there was a

01:19guy with a rifle on a roof?

01:22By the way, it was a sloped roof, and noticeably absent today was the sloped roof defense.

01:28I don't understand exactly what role that played in their initial pronouncements.

01:34After this attack, maybe they got roofied or otherwise convinced to adopt a feigned

01:41sloped roof defense, but that was absurd, as was the Secret Service's initial denials

01:48of the repeated requests made to the Secret Service for additional protection.

01:54Also unanswered, but that falls squarely within the context of the point of contact or the

01:59point of failure, why on earth did the snipers assigned to the second story window with a

02:06clear view of that infamous sloped roof, a clear view of where the shooter stood and

02:13tried to kill President Trump?

02:16Why was that manned initially with snipers, with sharpshooters, and then abandoned at

02:25some point before the shooting took place?

02:27Now look, these are and should be obvious and easy basic questions for the Secret Service

02:33to answer, and they have had no fewer than 17 days since the attack to answer these questions.

02:40These are questions that they should have started asking and probably should have been

02:44able to answer within 24 hours, and yet again and again and again, what I heard, what my

02:51colleagues heard, what you heard if you were watching, was worth looking into it.

02:56I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it.

02:59These are legitimate questions, and for the reasons that we've identified, it's not as

03:03though the Secret Service has comported itself in a manner that calls out to us to defer

03:09to them, to have confidence in them.

03:13Nobody wants to believe the worst, to suspect the worst about what happens within government.

03:20But when they lie to us repeatedly, then when they refuse to answer the most basic questions,

03:26when they almost willfully decline to take any of the most basic precautions in order

03:32to protect the president, the former president, and I hope the next president of the United

03:37States, one has to wonder.

03:40Remember, King David didn't personally kill Uriah the Hittite, but he let him go out into

03:47a battlefield where he knew there was an imminent risk of grave bodily injury, and he made sure

03:52he didn't have adequate protection.

03:54We've got to get to the bottom of these questions to make sure that Donald Trump was not intended

04:00to be a Uriah the Hittite.

'That Doesn't Cut It': Mike Lee Assails Secret Service Over Attempted Assassination Of Donald Trump

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