Sen. Josh Hawley said he’s been informed by whistleblowers that most of the agents assigned to protect Donald Trump during the assassination attempt at his Butler, Pa., rally in July were Homeland Security personnel who had minimal protective training.
Instead of having dozens of Secret Service agents on his detail for the July 13 rally, Trump was mostly guarded by Homeland Security agents who only received online webinar training before the event, Hawley (R-Mo.) said in an interview on “Jesse Watters Primetime” Tuesday evening.
“A two-hour, online webinar. And I’m told that half the time, the sounds to the webinar didn’t even work,” Hawley claimed.
“So think about this: The former president of the US … is sent out on stage, most of the people there are not trained, they’re not qualified. They only got a webinar training and even that didn’t work,” he scoffed.
“It is absolutely outrageous.”
The Homeland Security agents were supposedly pulled off child exploitation cases and other investigations in order to serve on Trump’s protective detail — which was something they did not normally do, Hawley added.
Hawley also called out the Secret Service and FBI for not sharing more information about the rally, where Trump narrowly avoided an assassination attempt by shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks.
“The only reason we have this information is because of whistleblowers,” he told Watters.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) recently revealed that a Butler SWAT team actually got off the first shots that damaged Crooks’ rifle and halted the shooting spree before the Secret Service finally jumped into action.
When acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe Jr. testified before Congress about the incident on July 31, he did not mention the local SWAT team’s action, Watters noted.
