Senators investigating Secret Service prod Trump to pick an outsider to lead the troubled agency

Senators who have been investigating the Secret Service after two assassination attempts on Donald Trump told The Washington Times the president-elect should tap an outsider to lead the agency.

Mr. Trump is in the process of naming Cabinet secretaries and other high-profile nominations. He has yet to say who he wants to lead the Secret Service, which acting Director Ronald Rowe is currently running.

The previous Secret Service Director, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned soon after the July 13 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. She was pressured to quit by lawmakers who accused her of dodging questions and accountability.

“Picking someone from outside the agency is preferable to within the agency because there really is a need for new managerial perspective and expertise,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, told The Washington Times. 

Mr. Blumenthal chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which, along with the full committee, has been investigating the July 13 and Sept. 15 assassination attempts on Mr. Trump.

Sen. Ron Johnson, the ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, agreed that Mr. Trump should look outside the Secret Service for a leader to overhaul the agency. 

“I would get an outsider that really knows how to run an organization and knows something about security,” the Wisconsin Republican told The Times.

Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican who sits on the Homeland Security Committee and has been conducting his own oversight of the Secret Service and collecting whistleblower information from agents who “have no confidence in their leadership,” also leans toward a new director from outside.

“Based on everything I’ve seen from the whistleblowers, what we’ve seen in our preliminary reports on the committee, this is an agency that needs some serious work. And I think that an outsider would be good,” he said. “But I don’t have a candidate. And I have no insight, no visibility into what [Mr. Trump] would be thinking.”

The Trump transition team declined to provide any insight on who the president-elect may tap for the job. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the transition, said those decisions will be announced when they are made.

An independent review panel of former law enforcement officials that investigated the Butler assassination attempt concluded its work last month and released a report recommending the next Secret Service director come from outside the agency to inject “fresh thinking” into an organization that has “become bureaucratic, complacent, and static.”

Mr. Johnson said most government agencies need an overhaul, not just the Secret Service. He suggested Mr. Trump appoint a secretary of information extraction to help unearth documents and information that executive agencies have kept from congressional investigators and other watchdog entities.

“These agencies are not going to be giving up their secrets, you know, their corruption, easily,” he said. “We have a new sheriff in town, and that sheriff in town is going to be telling agencies to provide documents. I don’t think they will.”

Mr. Johnson said the Homeland Security Committee has unearthed “some interesting developments” in its investigation into the Trump assassination attempts since issuing its interim report on the Butler attack in late September.

He said he could not provide details of those developments at this time since it’s a joint investigation and both parties have to sign off on anything they publicly release.  

“We want to write that up, but we got to get everybody cooperating,” he said. 

Mr. Blumenthal also declined to go into details of new investigative threads the committee may have uncovered. He said the investigation is unfolding in a “very bipartisan way” with him, Mr. Johnson and the chair and ranking member of the full committee, Sens. Gary Peters, Michigan Democrat, and Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, making decisions together.

While the group has not made any official decisions about issuing another public report, Mr. Blumenthal anticipates they will do so before the end of the year.

Mr. Peters told The Times the committee has conducted additional interviews and document collection since its interim report but still has more work to do. 

“We’re hoping to, at some point, start wrapping some of that up,” he said. 

However, the committee may not conclude its investigation this year. Mr. Peters said he spoke with Mr. Paul, who will be taking over as chair when Republicans take the majority next year, and they discussed continuing the investigation into the next Congress.

“As to how long, we’ll have to make that assessment,” he said. 

Mr. Johnson said he doubted the investigation would conclude this Congress “because I don’t think the Democrats are all that interested in pushing it forward.”

“Right now, it’s my staff pushing this thing forward,” he said. 

While he hopes the investigation can continue in a bipartisan manner, if Democrats don’t cooperate, Mr. Johnson said he and Mr. Paul could decide to release stuff on their own.

Across the Capitol, a House task force investigating the two Trump assassination attempts faces a Dec. 13 deadline to produce its final report.

Rep. Mike Kelly, Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the task force, told The Times his panel will meet that deadline.

He is planning to visit Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, the location of the second assassination attempt, this weekend to conduct a site assessment. 

Mr. Kelly said he is likely going by himself because the task force’s ranking member, Colorado Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, is not available, and he wasn’t sure if any other panel members could rearrange their schedules to join him. He said he is not going to be meeting with Mr. Trump while he is in Florida, given the president-elect is busy with other matters.

The task force has focused more on the Butler assassination attempt, where a gunman shot at Mr. Trump and grazed his ear with a bullet, than the Florida one, where the Secret Service stopped the would-be assassin before he was able to fire any shots or even get within line of sight of the former president.

The task force has been interviewing Secret Service agents involved in securing Mr. Trump’s Butler rally as part of the second phase of its investigation, as well as others who were there from the Homeland Security Department and FBI either before or after the assassination attempt. 

Mr. Kelly said the panel has had cooperation from most federal agencies, except for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which provided assistance retrieving and investigating evidence connected to the Butler shooter’s firearm and self-made explosive devices.

Like other investigators, the House panel has run into some issues getting direct answers from Secret Service personnel on what went wrong. 

“There is kind of a paranoia that somehow we’re going to look bad,” Mr. Kelly said. “And so when I’ve talked to them, I’ve said, ‘Well, what looks worse is when you don’t answer questions that you could answer. That makes it worse, and then people really start to doubt you.’ But it’s hard for them.”