Would-be assassin Ryan Wesley Routh set up to assassinate former President Donald Trump as he played golf because the Secret Service, in the second such failure, did not secure the perimeter around the Trump International Golf Course.
Acting Director Ronald Rowe told reporters in West Palm Beach yesterday that the agency did its job. But he also admitted that the agency did not sweep the perimeter of the course because Trump wasn’t scheduled to play golf.
The failure comes two months after the agency failed to secure the perimeter around a Trump campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, where deceased would-be assassin Thomas Matthews Crooks shot Trump in the ear and murdered firefighter Corey Comperatore.
400 Yards Away
As The New American reported yesterday, the criminal complaint against Routh, written by an FBI agent, said convicted felon Roush waited at the golf course for 12 hours, starting at about 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning. He carried an SKS-type rifle and GoPro camera, presumably to record the assassination.
The 58-year-old Routh was several hundred yards ahead of Trump, who was playing with a campaign donor and was between the fifth and sixth holes.
A Secret Service agent, the complaint explained, saw what appeared to be “a rifle poking out of the tree line.” The agent fired, and Routh fled, driving away in a Nissan SUV. Martin County sheriff’s deputies collared him on Interstate 95 North.
Given that Crooks crawled to within some 150 yards of Trump and had a clear shot, the obvious question is why the Secret Service didn’t surround the golf course. Answer: It was Trump’s fault for playing golf.
Or so it seems.
Rowe said his agency didn’t guard the perimeter because the outing wasn’t scheduled.
“Immediately following the assassination attempt of former president Donald J Trump on July 13,” Rowe said, “the Secret Service moved to increase assets to an already enhanced security posture for the former president,” Rowe said.
President Biden ordered the agency to provide the “highest levels of protection” for Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, and so the agency “moved to sustain increases in assets and the level of protection sought.”
Those resources “were in place” on Sunday, Rowe continued, at about 1:30 p.m. But Trump’s heading out for a round was an “an off-the-record movement.”
The agent “supporting the front edge of the agency’s layered approach to protection” encountered Routh “attempting to secret himself in the wood line.”
Routh was on the “public side of the fence near the sixth green,” Rowe continued:
As former president Trump was moving through the fifth fairway across the course and out of sight of the sixth green, the agent who was visually sweeping the area … saw the subject armed with what he perceived to be a rifle and immediately discharged his firearm.
Routh did not have a clear shot at the former president, Rowe said.
Rowe explained that the “protective methodologies … were effective,” and that the “increased assets” that Biden ordered “were in place.” They included a counter sniper team and counter surveillance.
But “was the golf course searched thoroughly before the former president’s arrival?” a reporter asked.
Replied Rowe:
[I]t was an off the record movement, meaning it was not on the former president’s official schedule. And what I go back to is the layered approach, the elements and the methodologies of the Secret Service.You know, there was a front element. It did its job in sweeping ahead of the president. That’s what identified this individual who was in that wood line and the swift action of that agent doing his job, pushing out ahead, sweeping while the president was behind him several 100 yards and several holes away out of sight from the gunman did his job.
Rowe said he didn’t know whether Routh knew Trump would be on the golf course.
Routh must have known something, having stationed himself to shoot Trump as he approached, was on, or walked off the sixth green. As well, again, Routh lie in ambuscade for Trump for 12 hours.
If Routh knew nothing about Trump’s schedule, then he simply guessed that Trump would play golf that day.
“How many times did your agents go around the perimeter and scope out the golf course during the 12 hours that this guy was holed up in the shrubbery?” a reporter asked.
Replied Rowe:
So we, this was an off the record movement. It wasn’t a site that was on his schedule, it wasn’t part of his schedule. So there was no posting up of it because he wasn’t supposed to have gone there in the first place.
At a news conference after the shooting, the sheriff of West Palm Beach, Ric Bradshaw, said the perimeter was not secured because Donald Trump isn’t the sitting president.
Failure in Butler, Pennsylvania
The admission that the agency didn’t secure the perimeter — whatever the reasons — won’t help its reputation on Capitol Hill.
The attempted assassination of Trump on July 13 revealed a long list of failures that included encountering Crooks hours before he shot Trump and not stationing an agent on the roof from which Crooks fired because it was too steep.
Video showed Crooks’s sprint on the roof to set up for the shot at Trump. Local police spotted Crooks on the roof 30 minutes before he fired.
But as well, the agency left perimeter security to the local police.
The bungled security operation led to the resignation of then Director Kimberly Cheatle. One of her top priorities at the agency was ensuring that women held 30 percent of the agency’s jobs by 2030.
Of that near assassination, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said Americans will be shocked, astonished and appalled” when they find out what lawmakers have learned.
