Secret Service has failed Americans since the Trump shooting

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Those of us who have studied modern assassinations, including those of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., hoped the government had learned a lesson from its dismal public responses.

The government’s repeated failure to address what it knew quickly fed suspicions that the silence itself was evidence of a conspiracy. The federal government sealed files for decades and refused to disclose information — often to protect the reputation of agencies and their officials — which only added fuel to conspiracy theories.

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we are seeing that happen again.

Until this week there had not been a single news conference by the Secret Service or the Department of Homeland Security, no release of files that might show the preparations for securing vulnerable locations from which an assassin might strike, not even a formal news release from the officials facing criticism for unmistakable miscues caught on video by those at the rally.

Neither the public nor Congress learned much more when Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service at the time of the shooting, appeared before a congressional committee on Monday. Cheatle acknowledged that the shooting at the Trump rally ranked as the agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades. But there was outrage from both Democrats and Republicans at her repeated refusal to answer specific questions about the security failures that contributed to it.

The silence looked particularly bad given news reports, initially denied by the government, that top Secret Service officials over a two-year span rejected repeated requests for more agents and magnetometers at Trump’s large public events, as well as declined to provide extra snipers for outdoor venues.

Cheatle, who resigned on Tuesday, told Congress, “The assets that were requested for that day were given.” Still, suspicions were allowed to fester that Trump’s protection service was deliberately lax.

In this age of social media, it took only minutes after the assassination attempt before conspiracy speculation appeared online. America’s polarized partisans embraced equally implausible plots. Trump’s most rabid fans put the blame on the so-called deep state, while those who considered the former president a threat to democracy dismissed it as a fake event. Platforms such as X and Telegram were deluged with posts about the attempt being “staged” or an “inside job.”

The theories were not simply the province of the fringes of the internet. Elon Musk responded to a question on X — “How was a sniper with a full rifle kit allowed to bear crawl onto the closest roof to a presidential nominee”? — by saying, “Extreme incompetence or it was deliberate.” That post was viewed 92 million times. Rep. Mike Collins, R, Ga., said on the night of the shooting that President Joe Biden “sent the orders.” The far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, also a Georgia Republican, posted on X, “This reeks of something a lot more sinister and bigger.” A political adviser to a Democratic megadonor, the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, sent an email the same night to some journalists wondering if the shooting was “staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash.” The adviser, Dmitri Mehlhorn, later apologized.

The reach of these conspiracy theories is indeed vast. The New York Times reported that 24 hours after the assassination attempt, social media posts asserting that Biden and his allies had engineered the attack “had been viewed and shared millions of times.”

No one expects instant answers; that would provoke as much skepticism as a long delay. But the public has become accustomed to officials holding regular news conferences in the aftermath of tragedies and disasters. The public will tolerate “We are not sure yet” or “that is still under investigation” if other facts are revealed as the investigators uncover them.

Conspiracy theorists fill the void or challenge established facts with their own versions of the truth. Once a falsehood gets repeated enough, it is hard to reverse it. In the early days following the Kennedy assassination, it was often said that the greatest marksmen in the world tried and failed to repeat what the government said Lee Harvey Oswald had done — fire three shots at a moving target in a very short amount of time. But it turned out that Oswald had plenty of time to get the shots off, and what he did has been replicated numerous times. Still, I wish I had a dollar for every person who has said to me, “I heard the world’s best snipers couldn’t do what they said Oswald did.”

We saw following the Kennedy and King murders that many people had difficulty accepting that a single troubled, otherwise inconsequential person could change history. A conspiracy theory did that very nicely. If President Kennedy was killed because a secret cabal had to stop him from withdrawing from Vietnam, or because he wanted to upend the Central Intelligence Agency, it gave some meaning to his death. It is not as if he died for no reason at the hands of a single unbalanced assassin.

It was similar with King: James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old small-time criminal, killing him on his own. Putting a large conspiracy behind King’s murder seemed to give odd comfort to some people.

The House is expected on Wednesday to approve a bipartisan task force to investigate the attempted assassination, to be led by Republicans. Seven Republicans and six Democrats would sit on the panel. That is encouraging.

We think a better approach would be a Sept. 11-style commission, with broad subpoena power, free of far-right and far-left political appointees. Will its eventual report extinguish conspiracy speculation about what happened in the Trump shooting? Probably not. President Kennedy’s assassination is still a hotly contested topic more than six decades later.

Without such an independent inquiry and report, however, history will be left to unqualified social media influencers and malicious actors, whether governments or individuals, who intentionally spread disinformation for their own purposes. That is a surefire recipe for ensuring the country stays divided forever about what happened.

Gerald Posner is the author of books about the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (“Case Closed”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“Killing the Dream”). Mark Zaid is a lawyer specializing in cases involving national security who has represented Secret Service agents spanning the administrations of President Eisenhower to President Biden, including those in the Kennedy detail on the day President Kennedy was shot. This article originally appeared in the New York Times.