Speaker 1: And welcome back here to live now from Fox. I'm Andrew Kraft what we want to do right now Transition into more of these top breaking headlines here And we want to focus on some of the probes that are ongoing into the first and second assassination attempts into and against Donald Trump here There was a bipartisan Senate report a preliminary report released today We're gonna get into some of those findings also previewing what's happening tomorrow on Capitol Hill It will be the first public hearing of the bipartisan task force on the House side looking into that shooting attempt, that assassination attempt in Butler, PA, on July the 13th. Fox News correspondent Lucas Tomlinson with more.

Speaker 2: Take a look at what happened. Multiple foreseeable and preventable failures allowed a would-be assassin to fire multiple shots toward former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, back in July. It's a tragedy of errors, just one after another. The preliminary bipartisan Senate report found failures at nearly every level ahead of the shooting, including no clear chain of command, no coverage plan for the building where the shooter fired from, no single line of communication, and equipment failures. When you have human error, you fix it by replacing the humans. The Secret Service responded to the report saying many of the insights gained from the Senate report align with the findings from our mission assurance review and are essential to assuring that what happened on July 13th never happens again. The report comes just a day after a second would-be assassin who allegedly plotted to kill Trump at one of his Florida golf clubs was officially charged with attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate.

Speaker 3: There is significant evidence that not only did he plan this for a very long time, but he took what is called a substantial step towards carrying out this plan. So it seems like a very open and shut case on the factual side of things.

Speaker 2: And that's not all. The Trump campaign now says it was briefed by intelligence officials about quote, real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate Trump. The House is also investigating these plots against Donald Trump and is scheduled to hold its first public hearing tomorrow. In Washington, Lucas Tomlinson, Fox News.

Speaker 1: Lucas, thanks so much. In the meantime here, let's bring into the conversation right now our friend Bill Gage with the Safe Haven Security Group to talk about some of the findings in this preliminary report. He joins me. Bill, good to see you here. Can't thank you enough. We've relied on you so heavily to help us make sense of these, you know, ongoing multiple investigations here. We brought you on last week because the U.S. Secret Service itself released their own preliminary report into what happened there in Butler. Today, the Senate has released its own preliminary report. It's not a permanent report here, but this is what they had found, that failures by the Secret Service bill, quote, in planning, communications, security, and allocation of resources for the July 13th rally were foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt that day. Not sure if you've gone over the report just yet here, but according to it, many failures on the Secret Service's part here. Bill, how do you respond?

Speaker 4: Hey, thanks for having me again, Andrew. I did read the report and the things you just had on the screen there. If we wanted to just break those down one by one, one of the first things that really stuck out to me was the no clear lines of authority or essentially who was in charge. And I believe the report even said that some of the agents were pointing fingers at each other on who actually thought the other person was in charge. And during my time in the Secret Service, the person in charge was always the lead advance. So the lead advance is from, works under the Office of Protective Operations and the field offices are there to support them. So I'm not sure how there was any confusion on who was in charge. It should have been the lead advance, which would have come from the Trump detail. And they would have been in charge of the overall visit from the airport to the hospital to Butler. If there were any other sites going on that Trump was going to visit that day in the area, The lead advance is the person in charge, so I'm not sure where that confusion was. And that's really sad for me as a former agent, if that was the case, because that wasn't the case when I was an agent. There were very clear lines of authority there. And essentially, I hate to dumb it down, but you worked for the lead advance. They were in charge. So just to go on to the second point there, Andrew, as far as the, and I think I said this on your show, one of the first times I came on after Butler, there was clearly a miscommunication on who was responsible for the AGR building, who was going to cover that. And I think this report, as well as the Secret Service and probably the Secret Service's report, a mission assurance report, as well as other investigations are going to show that there was a real misunderstanding between the local law enforcement and the Secret Service on who specifically was in charge to secure the AGR building. So, you know, that stuck out to me. And then, you know, I've talked on your show too about the comms piece there, the communications. The Secret Service has struggled for this or struggled with this for years. And it's not, it's a complicated piece of technology. It's not plug and play. The Secret Service has got to really rely on the military and maybe the tech industry to solve this comms piece to figure out how in the world we can have all these different radio channels all fed into a security room, and then these radio channels broadcast it out to all the different security entities. So they're gonna have to find a way. I've read some of the online comments. I've even got some hate comments from being on your show and other Fox outlets, Andrew. People making fun of me. It's not that complicated, but it is that complicated. If you talk to any member of the special ops community, they will tell you that comms are very, very difficult when you're talking about, you know, communicating over long distances and different radio channels and frequencies. It starts to get really complicated, but it can be solved and I think the Secret Service

Speaker 1: is going to do that. So Bill, to your point about communications, and you're saying Secret Service, no matter what, because the finger pointing is still going on between federal, state and local right now. That no matter what, the Secret Service is the lead because the protectee is in their custody here. When you talk about communications, the lead advance agent's radio didn't work, Bill. Could you pinpoint to all the problems stemming from just that fact?

Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a big problem. I'm not sure if a battery died. The Motorola radios that the Secret Service carries are widely used in law enforcement. The batteries are very finicky. You could put a battery in that has a full charge and five minutes later, the battery's dead. So I'm not sure if it was a battery issue, if maybe they had dropped it at some point and it wasn't functional or operational. Listen, that is your lifeline. I've been in law enforcement for 25 years and I do a lot of teaching at the police academy. And even when I was an agent, we would talk about this all the time. The radio is by far the most important piece of gear that you carry because that is your lifeline. And I'm not really sure what was going on with that agent. And like I said, maybe the battery's dead, maybe radio wasn't functioning. It's always possible it wasn't their fault. Maybe it just they turned it on and it didn't work, but there's no excuse for not having a functioning radio. So Bill,

Speaker 1: I also have in front of me a statement from a U.S. Secret Service chief of comms, his name Anthony Guglielmi. And in it, I'm going to read it a little bit, but they essentially agreed with the preliminary findings of this Senate report today. They say this, we've reviewed the interim reports on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. They say the weight of our mission is not lost on us and in this hyperdynamic threat environment the U.S. Secret Service cannot fail. They say the U.S. Secret Service has implemented changes to our protective operations including the protective posture, elevating the protective posture for our protectees and bolstering our protective details as appropriate in order to ensure the highest levels of safety and security for those we protect here. So they say many of the insights gained from the Senate report align with the findings from our mission assurance review. Do you see it that way? Are they one-to-one? Are they all in alignment here? Because what came out of the Senate report, Bill, is that according to some of these senators, the FBI has not been responsive about how the FBI communicates with the Secret Service. The ODNI, that's the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has not been responsive in speaking to personnel here. It seems like some of these lawmakers are quite rankled. They're not getting the transparent answers from these agencies that they want and that they need.

Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I can't really speak to that, Andrew, but what I can tell you, I've said on your show many times and other Fox outlets, some of the other print media that I've been on the FBI criminal investigation into this incident in Butler is going to take priority. They have primacy. They have the ultimate authority. And if they don't want to release it because it's a pending criminal investigation by law, they're not going to release it. And I understand that Congress, they're demanding answers. They have constituents that are demanding answers. The public wants to know, you know, Trump supporters and Trump voters want to know. But unfortunately, they're just going to have to be patient and wait, because the FBI, this criminal investigation going on, is the ultimate authority, and they don't want to compromise that investigation.

Speaker 1: Bill, just lastly, I thought this was quite stunning. Secret Service agents, according to the report, could see law enforcement running towards the AGR building, and still no one radioed to get the protectee, Donald Trump, off the stage there. We've talked about that, whether or not that will be included in the review here. His suspicious threats about individuals, i.e. Thomas Matthew Crooks, were known almost an hour before the shooting took place on site there, yet he was still allowed to go speak at his rally. Do you think that's a focus here?

Speaker 4: It could be, Andrew. There's a term, it's a cliche, it's used all the time, fog of war, and I hate to use that because this wasn't war, this wasn't the military, but the overall cliche I think is very applicable here because, listen, Andrew, I've been involved in these situations before where you see something and you're not quite sure what to make of it, and your brain's trying to process it. So I'm not excusing the delay there, that the agents clearly didn't put that out over the radio. I'm not sure what was going through their mind. I wasn't there. I don't want to put myself in their shoes. But what I will say, as someone who's been involved in many, many of those type situations, Andrew, sometimes your brain, you're trying to make sense of what you're seeing. And maybe there was a few seconds there where they were trying to, what in the world are those police officers running over there for with their guns drawn, trying to make sense of what they're seeing and trying to process that. The other thing is, I've talked on your show before, is this concept of a measured response, okay? Again, the Secret Service, every time one of these things happening, they can't go rush the protectee off the stage every single time there's a possible threat out there, because they would be removing the protective from the stage at almost every event. And so the Secret Service likes to take this measured response. And so that also might have played a role in their reasoning and their critical judgment while they were trying to process that information.

Speaker 1: Bill, just lastly and briefly here, I've heard a lot of talk about some concerns, especially from Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, that another attempt on Donald Trump's life could be made soon. And I'm not talking from foreign actors like Iranian elements, we'll get into that just a bit later here. But is that hyperbolic to ask? Is that accurate and fair to ask that because of some of these failures we've just documented from some of these reports that Donald Trump is liable to have another threat on his life again?

Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I hate to say it that way, Andrew, because it's, you know, very morbid and I wouldn't wish harm on any other human being. But just being frank, and it's a fact, you know, the country is very divided, 50-50, each side hates each other. And so, you know, what I would say, Andrew, I've said this on other outlets and on Fox, it's not like the election is going to happen and the next day we wake up the morning after the election and all of a sudden things are back to normal. And if Trump loses, he just goes on about his life, people are still going to dislike him, and people are still going to try to do him harm. So he probably is the most threatened, you know, elected politician in the free world.

Speaker 1: All right, Bill Gage, can't thank you enough. We just got this live pick, Bill, of President Biden and the first lady getting off Air Force One, I believe on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, back from New York now in Washington. I've been there many times. Many times. Yes, of course. Yes, of course. Bill, can't thank you enough. We'll talk soon.