James A. Gagliano joins Brian C. Anderson to discuss Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump and questions about security and the Secret Service.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on today’s show is James Gagliano, he’s a nationally recognized law enforcement analyst. James has too many credentials to list in full, but here’s a few. He served 25 years in the FBI and was appointed to various investigative, tactical, resolution, crisis management, undercover and senior management positions, including assignment to the FBI’s Elite Counterterror unit—the Hostage Rescue team—and as Senior Team Leader of the FBI’s New York Field Division SWAT team. He in fact won the FBI’s Medal of Bravery for his SWAT team’s actions in June 1993. He’s a graduate of West Point, a U.S. Army veteran, and on top of all of that, currently serves as mayor of the Village of Cornwall on Hudson in New York. He’s written for City Journal before, and he’s a regular presence on TV and in the media.
So James, thanks very much for joining us for this discussion about what just happened.
James Gagliano: Brian, thanks for having me. I always appreciate the work of the Manhattan Institute and enjoy City Journal and I appreciate you guys having me on.
Brian Anderson: So we’re recording this just shortly a few days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. It’s still obviously dominating the news, but the dust has settled a little bit. What are the main security challenges in your view, highlighted by what happened on Saturday?
James Gagliano: I think to look at this from the macro level, I mean, political violence is unfortunately part of our culture. It’s gone on for a long time, since the founding of our nation, and four U.S. presidents have died while in office, and not that long ago. You look at Lincoln and Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy, you look at a couple of failed attempts on President Gerald Ford and obviously President Ronald Reagan, the most recent, in 1981. And some of the things that have gone on of recent from people being attacked at a congressional baseball game to the Speaker of the House’s husband being attacked in his home, this is not something I think is new and that’s just sprung up—it’s a tale as old as time.
The folks that are charged to protect VIPs—we don’t use that in the business, that term, they’re the protectees—that do that, such as the Secret Service or the FBI, which provides protection to attorneys general and provides protection to the FBI director. It’s a business that the old saying, and I hate to use a trite cliche, but the good guys have to get it right every single time. The bad guys just have to get it right once. And look what happened on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania. We have to mute our elation that yes, the former president and current presidential candidate was lucky, whether it was divine providence or whether it was just blind luck, whatever it was, but a 50-year-old man shielding his family did lose his life, and two others are in critical condition right now.
So this is something that I think as we roll into day two of the Republican National Convention out in Milwaukee, it is something that the Secret Service and obviously law enforcement, writ large, if this doesn’t serve as a wake-up call, because many of these events like what’s going on in Milwaukee right now, are integrated events just like the campaign rally stop in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. Obviously the resources weren’t as robust there, but this is something I think that has put protection of our political leaders, folks that would be potentially targets for assassination as what happened on Saturday, it’s put this on the front burner. And I think the congressional investigation, the independent investigation ordered by President Biden, as well as the FBI’s investigation into what happened, there’s just a lot more questions than answers at this juncture.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, I guess that’s the question that a lot of Americans have. How could the shooter get so close to the target? Personally, I don’t quite understand how someone could get to such a key vantage point from that nearby roof, which would, on the face of it, seem an obvious place to protect. So, you had mentioned the resource limitations. Could that have been a factor here in what happened?
James Gagliano: Well, the lessons learned in December of 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was tragically assassinated by a trained . . . Lee Harvey Oswald was a trained United States Marine Corps sniper but had sought the high ground in a building that had a perch overlooking where the presidential motorcade was traveling. And the lessons learned from that, we’re constantly talking about in the business, as I say, what are the lessons learned? We don’t want to make the same mistakes twice. And in this instance, could it have been a paucity of resources?
Look, there have been accusations. I think Congressman Waltz in Florida has accused the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security of not providing additional resources to former President Trump’s security detail. It’s a tough thing that the Secret Service has to do when you have a presidential campaign, I’m sorry, a presidential candidate such as Donald Trump, who—his supporters love him, they adore him, and his detractors loathe him. He’s a polarizing figure, and you would’ve thought that this would’ve engendered a larger or more robust Secret Service detail. I get it. When you’re planning for something like a major political party’s national convention like this week in Milwaukee for the Republicans, that’s a national special security event. It’s designated, it’s planned for up to a year out, and obviously any resources, men, and material that are needed are positioned there for that.
When it’s something like what took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, which this could have been an agenda item that had gone on a day or two before, and the Secret Service with a small cadre, they’re not protecting a current president, they’re protecting a former president. They’ve got a small cadre, they sent an advanced team out, and they’re forced, it’s customary in the business, that they use as a force multiplier local and state police departments. Well, Brian, I’m here to tell you as much as I revere and adore law enforcement across the nation, I’ve worked with many, many police departments at the local and state levels, and they are the finest men and women that we have to offer in this country, but they’re not all the same. They’re not all trained the same, they’re not all equipped the same. And in this instance, you talk about someone, and with what we know right now, the FBI has acknowledged that it’s a 20-year-old young man who they believe acted alone, was able to reach a perch on top of a building 130 yards away.
I’ll close with this. As a former FBI SWAT team sniper and someone who attended the United States Marine Corps Scout Sniper School, we’re trained and qualified to shoot out to 1,000 meters. Someone shooting at 130 yards, that’s something that you could give me a civilian off the street, give me 15 minutes on a range with them, and they could come pretty close to hitting their target from 130 yards away. So in this instance, it is a colossal breach of security.
I don’t want to point fingers yet, I want to allow the investigation certainly to unfold and all the details to emerge, but you would think that that rooftop should have had controlled access to it. There should have been law enforcement either atop it or controlling who had access to it. And Brian, that’s clearly not what happened here.
Brian Anderson: As a lay person, I would appreciate and I’m sure many of our listeners would appreciate it, what else leapt out to you? I assume you’ve watched some of the video footage that we’ve seen, the shots ringing out, Trump going down, the Secret Service surrounding him. Were there other signs there of kind of institutional failure or were things done well after that point?
James Gagliano: Well, we talk in Homeland Security from the theoretical perspective about cascading systems failures, that if there’s one breach in an operation, it has a very deleterious effect on the overall operation. And in this business, the businesses protect the protectee and prevent the protectee from getting hurt and you obviously want the people that are around the protectee, like unfortunately, the three people that were wounded and one fatally, to be protected as well.
I hate to do this again because this is such the easy boogeyman to point to when you talk about communications. We are blessed in this nation with amazing emergent technologies in the law enforcement realm. Facial recognition, dating back to the ‘80s, what DNA has done for us in collecting evidence, in making cases and prosecuting cases, surveillance cameras and the ability to look at all the different video feeds you got. Most of those came from somebody’s pocket computer, which is a cell phone able to capture that. But in the communications realm and in speaking between agents and officers, the problem with it, and this is something that it is yet to be figured it out, people say, well, why weren’t all these people on the same frequency? Why weren’t all the officers and agents on the same frequency? And it can’t work that way.
So you’ve got a command frequency, and then you have the counter sniper frequency, then you have the counter assaulting team frequency, then you have different agency frequencies. Normally what happens is there’s a liaison in an offsite command post, joint operations center, fusion cell, whatever you want to call it, and every agency calls it something different. But you have so many different frequencies, and because . . . and the Butler case is a pure example of this, there was no inter-agency training. To my knowledge, there was no inter-agency, tabletop exercise, field training exercise to my knowledge because again, these events, like this whistle-stop tour, this campaign event that was probably thrown together a couple of days in advance, there’s just not the time or resources for that. So I would say that communications here was probably something that caused that delay.
We’ve all seen the video, the one minute and 30 seconds, almost 90 seconds from the time that you hear people shouting and pointing out a man on a roof with a gun. And the fact that the protectee, the former president, was not shielded immediately and rushed off the stage into the waiting up-armored suburban, I’m going to guess also that that’s going to be something that is determined to have been a colossal failure or a cascading system failure here.
Brian Anderson: There’s been a lot of criticism, obviously, in the wake of this assassination attempt, on the quality of the Secret Service. I wonder, this is a broad question, but in your view, has the agency declined in any way? I was looking online, seeing people grumbling about near misses going back into the Obama years, that there was a sense that, at least according to these reports I was looking at, that the agency was becoming, the Secret Service was becoming more bureaucratic and less focused on its crucial mission. You work in this industry; I just wonder what your take is on that.
James Gagliano: I think that’s a fair criticism and I wouldn’t necessarily just point it at the service. I could also point it toward an agency I spent half my life in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, you could point it to the DEA, you could point it to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. These are all bureaucracies.
I know that this would delve into a different avenue, and that’s not why you’re having me on, but you can talk about the resistance to treating things as a meritocracy and certain hires that are made. I’m not suggesting in this instance that DEI is the scourge here or to blame here, or the fact that what appears to be right now, a failure occurred because the agents just aren’t as good as they were back in the ‘50s or the ‘60s. I’m not going to suggest that at all.
I do think that as society evolves and our culture evolves, some people would argue devolves, that some of the mission focus has changed. I experienced it toward the tail end of my FBI career. I joined the FBI in 1991, cut my teeth under agents that had served under J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover was at the helm of the FBI for 48 years and served under eight different presidents all the way from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon. So the Bureau had a particular way of doing things. Now, there are plenty of things to criticize him about, you can go into COINTELPRO, you can go into a lot of things that you could criticize him or the agency about, but the agency had a reputation and it had a standard.
I can’t speak to the Secret Service in the same way I can the FBI because I understand the FBI’s history and know it deeply and intrinsically, but they are a similar organization to the FBI. It’s a long and storied agency. They are dealing with some of the changing values in America and how people get put into certain positions and the fact that you need to count numbers, we need so many of these and so many of this and so many of that. And the fact that some could argue that we’ve lost that pursuit of meritocracy, where the best people are always in the best positions.
Now, I say that, and that’s not maligning the agents that were there that day that certainly sprung into action and were under fire, and they raced to the sound of the guns when the vast majority of the world would’ve run away from the sound of the guns. So I’m not suggesting that, but I am suggesting that at the upper echelons, a lot of decisions are being made that I would argue, not just in the Secret Service or the FBI, but across the bureaucracies that we talked about a few minutes ago, that there has been a distraction or a movement off of getting the best people, putting them in the best positions, giving them the best gear and equipment and letting them do their jobs.
Brian Anderson: You’ve mentioned the, something we all recognize now, the very polarized political environment we’re living in. We’re in a very intense election cycle with polarizing candidates. A lot of weirdness in the air basically, and you’ve got to look to the next several months as potentially wide open to future security concerns and breaches. So I wonder what measures should be taken to improve the security of high profile political figures going forward? Do you hire private security as well? What options are out there to make sure that there’s far less of a chance of this occurring again?
James Gagliano: Sure, and I think you could probably go back as far as Sun Tzu, the great Chinese general and philosopher who . . . And this has been stated in many different ways across the ages, but bad guys or evil, terrorists and criminals, they’re like water, they take the path of least resistance. So I’ve argued that a place like the Fiserv auditorium or convention center, the site of the Republican National Convention this week, that will literally be the safest place in the world to inhabit this week. And why is that? You have hundreds of law enforcement agencies, they have game-planned this, they have table-topped it, they have field-training exercised it, they have done tactical evaluations without troops. They’ve done all the things preparing for it, and they will get whatever resources they need.
The bad guys look at that, and boy, would that be a great place to make a splash? Sure it would, it’s an attractive target and the people that will be there would be attractive targets, but it’s difficult, and bad state actors, whether they’re lone wolves or whether or not they’re supported by another nation such as Russia or China or Iran or North Korea, bad state actors on the international level, or whether or not it’s just a group of criminals or terrorists. Whatever it is, they are going to look for attractive targets where we’re asleep at the wheel.
I learned this at a very young age. It was in 1995. I’d only been in the FBI for a couple years. I was a young brick agent in the Brooklyn Queens office of the FBI, working on the Gambino organized crime squad, the Gotti Squad, as it was called back then. And in 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah building, the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing by Timothy McVeigh, a right-wing extremist bombed it and many people were killed, the building was destroyed, and it was a shocking act of terror. And as a result of that, then Director Louis Freeh decided to beef up the security detail for then Attorney General Janet Reno. And so I was dispatched from New York with a couple other young agents, sent immediately down to Washington, DC to bolster the attorney general detail that was currently supporting Attorney General Reno.
I’ll never forget having a conversation with a senior agent who was down there, and he’d been on the attorney general detail for 10 or 15 years, and he’s talking to me over coffee and he says, “Jimmy, two things. One, complacency kills. Surveillance and protection details are some of the most mundane, boring, just excruciatingly boring duties. But if you allow yourself to get complacent, you’re doing a disservice to your protectee and to yourself.” The second thing he said was this, and it really struck me, and I’ve never forgotten it, either. It doesn’t matter who you are, the president of the United States, what you would think would be the most protected person in this nation, if not in the world, but we live in a free and open society. We don’t live under martial law. The president isn’t confined to a bunker underground 24/7, 365. He’s going to be out talking to people, meeting with people, shaking hands, kissing babies, delivering addresses, and we live in a free and open society. He said, “There is no one on the face of this planet . . . you cannot 100% guarantee the security of their life. You’re going to do everything you can to reduce the variables. You’re going to do everything you can, up to and including putting your body in front of a bullet, for this person, the protectee. But the reality of the business is, in a free and open society, there’s no one that you can guarantee 100% protection.” And I’ve used that quote recently across the past couple of days in talking to different media platforms, and it’s something that has always stuck with me, that you do the best job that you can. You buttress the mission by putting the best resources available there for somebody who is a threat, somebody who is part of making an attractive target for bad guys and for evil, but there just are no guarantees. And I know that there’ll be colossal failures that were probably going to come out of this shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, but I also believe that, again, it’s part of the business that if you put somebody like that out in public, it’s impossible to guarantee 100% protection.
Brian Anderson: Well, that’s a sober but useful point to end on, James. Don’t forget to check out James Gagliano’s work on the City Journal website, he’s written for us a few times. We’ll link to his author page in the description. You can find City Journal on X @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_mi. And as usual, if you like what you’ve heard on the podcast, please give us a five star rating on iTunes. James, thank you very much for the illuminating walkthrough of these troubling events.
James Gagliano: Brian, thanks for having me.
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