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David Marcus Op-ed: The Secret Service in shambles reveals a White House where the buck stops nowhere

  By David Marcus Fox News | Published July 16, 2024 3:12pm EDT | Updated July 16, 2024 3:19pm EDT

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/secret-service-shambles-reveals-white-house-where-buck-stops-nowhere

The most central and important rule of the Biden administration is that nothing that happens is ever the fault of the Biden administration. It’s not just that the buck doesn’t stop with the president, it doesn’t stop anywhere in the executive branch, including, we now know, the Secret Service.

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we’ve heard that the once and likely future president was being protected by a mix of Secret Service agents and state and local police. And as it has become more obvious that the Saturday attack was a catastrophic security failure, the finger-pointing and ass covering has begun.

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According to Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, the federal agency was only responsible for the actual grounds where Trump spoke, not the surrounding area, which he claims was the responsibility of the local police. This is abject nonsense. The idea that the Secret Service was not responsible for a building with perfect sniper sightlines 150 yards from where Trump was speaking doesn’t just strain credulity, it snaps it in half. And the idea that guarding Trump was up to local cops and not the agency whose sole mission is keeping protectees safe doesn’t pass the smell test.

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We are talking about the life and death protection of a former and, at this point, likely future president of the United States. You don’t outsource that to local cops in a town of 13,000 people. It’s like asking Andy Griffith to hunt down ISIS.

The director of the Secret Service, Kim Cheatle, we have to come to understand, is a massive proponent of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. After Biden in 2022 made her just the second woman ever to lead the agency, she boasted Security Magazine of her prowess at breaking glass ceilings and the agency’s website states that Cheatle is responsible for executing the agency’s integrated mission of “protection and investigations by leading a diverse workforce.”

It’s too soon to say that this obsession with DEI came at the expense of Trump’s safety, but we all saw the video of the shooting’s aftermath, where a female agent a foot shorter than Trump tried to cover his body and another struggled to holster her gun. It made the Keystone Cops look like Kojak.

Allow me to be blunt, Cheattle should be fired. It should have happened days ago, but as Trump pointed out at the debate, nobody ever gets fired by Joe Biden.

Jake Sullivan still has his job after saying the Middle East was calm about 10 minutes before Hamas’ heinous Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Alejandro Mayorkas is still running the broken and busted border, and now a Secret Service Director’s incompetence and bizarre priorities have come within a whisker of getting Trump killed. At this point, I have no idea what somebody would have to do to get fired by Biden. Maybe burn down the White House?

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We all know that people make mistakes, and that sometimes people just aren’t good at their job. If that person is an office manager or barista, we’ll all survive. When your job is to keep the leader of the free world breathing, you don’t get to make oopsies.

Now would be a good time to start changing all that, for Biden to summon his inner Harry Truman, and say the buck does stop with him, and that he does have the backbone to let people go when their incompetence puts America and the lives of its citizens at risk.

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But we all know very well that that isn’t going to happen. Once again, there will be no consequences, no transparency, and no accountability, just the same shameful pat on the back, and you’ll do better next time we always see. America deserves much, much better than this. Corey Comperatore, who was murdered under the not-so watchful eye of the Secret Service certainly does, as did the three other victims, including Trump.

It didn’t seem to be a coincidence that when Donald Trump made his surprise appearance on Monday at the Republican National Convention, his Secret Service detail looked much different. Members were taller, more male, and more like law enforcement and less like a Benetton ad. But it is too little too late.

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It was too late to save a brave American husband and father, and nearly too late to save the Republican presidential nominee. It needs to stop, before more Americans lose their lives.

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David Marcus is a columnist living in West Virginia and the author of “Charade: The COVID Lies That Crushed A Nation.”