ATLANTA — Safeguarding the president and former presidents of the United States, their families and those around them whenever they're out in public requires a lot of work.
It's especially difficult when events are outside and not contained to a specific area. 11Alive spoke to former Secret Service Agent Bobby McDonald moments after a shooting that left one dead and several injured, including former President Donald Trump, at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooting is being called an assassination attempt on the former President.
McDonald is a lecturer of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven and a retired Supervisory Secret Service Agent. He spent 21 years with the Secret Service from 1995 to 2015 and was responsible for securing Presidents Clinton and Bush.
Angelina: Let's start off by giving me your reaction to what happened at former President Donald Trump's rally earlier today.
McDonald: Well, the first thing I thought of was this is what the Secret Service trains for every day. This is what we're paid to do. This is what we do. This is how we protect the protectees that we are charged with maintaining safety and getting them from point A to point B. Obviously, there's gonna be a lot of after-action, a lot of investigation here to see what the Secret Service did well and what the Secret Service didn't do well.
How can we move forward and, ultimately, tweak our protective method for these protectees to ensure nothing like this happens again? We want to make sure that we get better and better all the time at what we're trying to do in protecting our protectees, whether they're Presidents, Vice Presidents, former Presidents or their families.
Angelina: What goes into securing political events like this?
McDonald: When the staff of the former president, in this case, indicates to the Secret Service what the schedule is gonna be, depending upon how far out they develop that, the trips will be assigned to an agent who will be the lead advance agent for that trip. He or she will go out and coordinate with other members of their team and members of the local field office as well as local state and federal partners to make sure that the entire visit from the time they protect these plane lands till the time they leave that airport and go home.
That there is a seamless protective plan in place. Motorcade routes have been developed. Alternate motorcade routes have been developed, and a hospital survey has been developed. A command post has been developed. All of these things that the Secret Service does every time one of its protectees makes a movement are done each and every time with the same consistency to develop a secure and robust security plan for that protectee during that visit.
Angelina: In this case I think that everyone's question is probably going to be, 'How did this happen? How was this able to happen?'
McDonald: Great question, and that's exactly what we're gonna need to find out. The Secret Service now has gotten the former president out of that situation. I'm assuming he's getting some medical attention. We wanna make sure that we did what we were supposed to do. We want to make sure that we went through all the motions, if you will, to make sure everything from a 360-degree radius around the president was covered. Why this happened? How it happened? Who did it? The Secret Service will now maintain the criminal crime scene there until it's handed over to the FBI, who will investigate this.
The Secret Service's responsibility is the protection of the former President and getting him out of that situation and negating the threat initially, when it happens. The FBI then will come in and do the criminal investigation based upon what happened here and to develop any criminal charges with any remaining perpetrators who may still be alive.
Angelina: Would you say that in this incident something failed because the Secret Service's goal is to protect whoever may be their responsibility for that day? Obviously, in this case, the president ended up getting shot.
McDonald: I'm not sure at this point; I'm ready to say that something failed. Obviously, something happened here, some type of incident, some type of assassination attempt. We'll have to look at this very closely with a fine tooth comb to see again what happened, why it happened, and more importantly, how it happened and how we can prevent this from happening in the future. The fact that the President is alive today is a very good thing. The fact that I believe all the agents around him are alive is also a very good thing.
There is a deceased perpetrator. It's my understanding that there's also one bystander who was at the event that's also deceased. That is not a good thing, no matter how you slice it. It's important for the Secret Service again to continue to tweak its protective methodologies so that the protectee remains in a very safe and secure fashion, but also that we don't have any other injuries or loss of life, be it perpetrators or other bystanders.
Angelina: When a rally is held in an area like this where it is outdoors, and it's not something that's contained to a specific area or an event center, does that make it harder to secure?
McDonald: Outdoor events are very, very difficult. Whether it's a stadium or something of this nature that's built in a field or in a baseball stadium or whatnot, outdoor events are very difficult to secure. However, the Secret Service knows what it's doing. It has the protective methodologies and assets, and personnel to be able to provide what it believes is a very secure environment.
So again, it's very easy to uh to throw stones this early in the investigation, and I'm not particularly ready to do that yet, but the Secret Service will take a very good, hard look at what they did, how they did it, why they did it and what they can do better in the future to make sure something like this doesn't happen.
Angelina: Can we walk through the moment it happened? We see several minutes into the rally, the president was speaking, and as he turned his head, we heard pops, he went to try to touch his ear, and then from there, he got down, and the Secret Service came in. Talk to me about how they reacted and what that process is like.
McDonald:
I think if you watch the Secret Service envelope around the former President, then watch the counter-assault team come in, which is the heavy guns, if you will, that are always a couple of vehicles behind the President's motorcade or in and around the stage in this instance.
I think if you watch the Secret Service envelope around the former president, then watch the counter-assault team come in, which is the heavy guns, if you will, that is always a couple of vehicles behind the president's motorcade or in and around the stage in this instance. It was very obvious to me, listening to the open mic that was there and listening to the agents verbalizing commands from the supervisors, that they were doing exactly what we were trained to do every day. They were verbalizing, they were enveloping the president, they were getting large and around him so that any other subsequent shots from another perpetrator would be taken by them, which is what we do, and then they moved him very quickly, very deliberately.
It's exactly the fashion that we trained in. It was textbook, from leaving the podium to getting into the car. When anything like this happens, it never goes exactly by the book. It's chaotic. There's a lot of things going on. There are a lot of heart races or heart rates that go up very quickly. People sometimes can panic. Other people get in the way of other people reacting differently to gunshots. The Secret Service agents that were in and around the area protecting the inner circle around President Trump acted admirably today, and it was exactly how we trained. So that was very, very good to see that they had a good command of the situation. A very quick reaction to the situation. The threat was negated, and they got him to a safe environment and hopefully to the hospital that we checked out after the injury that he sustained.
Angelina: Can you talk to me about the moment where they keep him down and, obviously, wait to take him off the podium? What are they waiting for? I know that we can hear on the audio that someone says the shooter is down.
McDonald: We want to be able to again, develop a quick cocoon around the President so that we know that he is safe and sound. They are communicating with him on the ground and they're taking a slight pause. It wasn't a long pause, but it was a slight pause so that the asset that was able to fully negate the perpetrator here was able to communicate with the shift around the former President 'Hey, the perpetrator is down now is a safe time to move.' It was done in a textbook fashion.
Somebody might say, 'Hey, why didn't they move them out quicker?' They did exactly what they were supposed to do in the way that they were supposed to do it. We wanna move deliberately, we wanna move slowly and sometimes slowly is fast. When you're moving slowly, you are, in actuality, moving fast because you're able to get the information that you wanna know before you move him into a potentially other danger, dangerous situation.
Angelina: Moving forward from here, we know we will continue to see political rallies and different events happening not just for former President Trump but for President Biden as well. We have the RNC that's happening on Monday. What if anything will change now moving forward given this happening?
McDonald: The two conventions that are coming up in Chicago and Milwaukee, those have been designated National Special Security events meaning the Secret Service has been delegating the protective aspects of the events in those cities for the last year. There are numerous committees of state, local and federal partners that have been meeting. There is fencing around all of the venues. There's credentialing. Those cities or those areas of those cities where those stadiums are, the Pfizer Arena in Milwaukee and the United Center in Chicago is gonna be locked down.
There's not gonna be a whole lot of changing there. I think that moving forward we are in the home stretch to the election season, outdoor events are a part of it now. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, whether outdoor events kind of get tamped down a little bit and if we remain to do indoor events or smaller type events. Again, it'll be interesting to see the. I'd also be concerned about copycats now. Someone's gonna see this on the news and see an opportunity to do this down the road potentially. I think you'll see the Secret Service, which implements a very tight security program around all its protectees. It will be even a bit tighter as we move into the home stretch for the election season.