Acting Secret Service director vows ‘accountability’ over Trump assassination attempt
Ronald Rowe Jr., acting director of the U.S. Secret Service/Photo Credit: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)=
(WASHINGTON) — Accountability for the members of the Secret Service who were at fault for the July 13 assassination attempt against President-elect Donald Trump is “occurring,” acting Director of the Secret Service Ronald Rowe told a House task force investigating the incident on Thursday.
“All disciplinary measures are imposed to promote the efficiency of the Secret Service and to encourage behaviors and principles that ensure the success of the agency’s mission,” he testified.
“Employees receiving proposals of discipline will be provided due process under agency policy as well as any applicable laws and regulations. But, let me be clear, there will be accountability, and that accountability is occurring. Consistent with applicable laws and regulations, I cannot comment further on specific disciplinary actions underway or being considered.”
At the same time, he said, the agency should not be defined by one failure.
Suspected gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire during the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting Trump in the ear, killing one spectator and wounding two others.
A Secret Service Mission Assurance report was released earlier in the year, along with a Department of Homeland Security independent review and a Senate report.
Rowe testified that since becoming director he has focused on preventing another July 13 shooting from happening again.
In his memo, he said the Secret Service increased its staffing levels on the president-elect’s detail, expanding the use of drones at venues, expanding counter-drone technology at venues, addressing the faulty radio issue by working with the Defense Department, using other federal law enforcement agencies to help with protective visits and expanding the ballistic countermeasures at Secret Service protected events.
At the president-elect’s residences, the Secret Service has worked with state and local partners to bolster security and use cutting-edge technology to do so.
“My goal is to improve our mission effectiveness and rebuild public trust,” Rowe said. “One of the key systemic changes was the directive to mandate a unified command in a singular location for all protective sites, something that was not done on July 13th in Butler. This co-location enhances our communications and intelligence-sharing mechanisms with state, local and federal partners to better anticipate threats and respond to them more swiftly.”
Rowe testified that he has also prioritized the mental health of agents, adding a chief wellness officer just this week.
“While I cannot undo the harm that has been done, I am committed to doing everything in my power to ensure that the Secret Service never has a failure like this again.”
Photo by Saul Martinez for The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump responded Monday to special counsel Jack Smith’s move to dismiss the two felony cases against him.
“These cases, like all of the other cases I have been forced to go through, are empty and lawless, and should never have been brought,” he wrote on his social media platform.
“It was a political hijacking, and a low point in the History of our Country that such a thing could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump added.
Vice President-elect JD Vance said Trump could have “spent the rest of his life in prison” had the outcome of the 2024 race been different.
“If Donald J. Trump had lost an election, he may very well have spent the rest of his life in prison,” Vance wrote on X. “These prosecutions were always political. Now it’s time to ensure what happened to President Trump never happens in this country again.”
Smith, in back-to-back court filings, cited the Justice Department’s “categorical” policy that he said bars the prosecution of a sitting president as the reason for his request to drop the federal election interference case and the classified documents case.
Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, brought by Smith in connection with Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. The case was plagued with delays and developments, including a Supreme Court decision that a president is entitled to some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during their time in office.
Trump also pleaded not guilty to the 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified material after leaving the White House. The case was dismissed by a federal judge in Florida in July, though Smith had been appealing the decision.
During his presidential campaign, Trump told supporters he was their “retribution” and that he was “being indicted for you.”
Steven Cheung, the incoming White House communications director, called Smith’s decision a “major victory for the rule of law” and said Americans want Trump to end “weaponization of our justice system.”
Some of Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill also celebrated the development.
“Huge win for America, President Trump, and the fight against the weaponization of the justice system,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote on X. “This was ALWAYS about politics and not the law.”
California Democratic Sen.-elect Adam Schiff, however, said the Justice Department and the courts “failed to uphold the principle that no one is above the law.”
Schiff was a member of the House Jan. 6 Committee that spent more than a year investigating the Capitol attack. The panel, which voted to recommend charges against Trump, identified Trump and his actions after the 2020 election as the “central cause” of what transpired on Jan. 6, 2021.
“DOJ by neglecting to promptly investigate the events of Jan 6, and the courts by willfully delaying progress of the case and providing immunity,” Schiff wrote on X. “The public deserved better.”
(NEW YORK) — Luis Miranda is a political strategist, community organizer, founding president of the Hispanic Federation and chairperson of the Latino Victory Fund, an organization dedicated to building political power in the Latino community.
Originally from Puerto Rico, he’s also the father of musician, writer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda.
ABC News’ Linsey Davis sat down with Luis Miranda on Monday to talk about the comments made about Latinos and Puerto Rico at former President Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden campaign rally on Sunday, Trump’s criticism of former first lady Michelle Obama and his prediction for Puerto Rican voters’ reaction to this rhetoric.
ABC NEWS: Luis, thank you so much for joining us. First, I just want to get your reaction from, from those comments about Puerto Rico, from the comedian at last night’s rally.
MIRANDA: It’s not the first time that Puerto Ricans are insulted by Trump or his people. We remember when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, how he withheld aid that Congress had appropriated to help Puerto Rico and used as an excuse that we were lazy and they wanted everything done for us.
So I think we’re going to mobilize some more and we’re going to go to those battleground states and make sure that we prove him wrong. We are not garbage and we are not lazy and we’re all American citizens ready to vote in this election.
ABC NEWS: The Trump campaign says the comedian’s words do not reflect its views. Do you believe that this has no bearing on the former president’s campaign platform?
MIRANDA: Listen, I listened to 5 minutes, while I was waiting for you, of the rally that it’s taking place, place in Georgia right now. And in those 5 minutes, he criticized Michelle Obama. I wondered if she’s now included in the list of enemies that he’s going to prosecute afterwards.
He then talked about transgender and how that it’s horrible. He talked about people coming from the border, being criminals. He’s talking about Latinos. He helped the crowd chant “Lock her up.” She, he criticized the fake news.
This is in 5 minutes, which means when you, that’s what is coming out of his mouth. When you organized a rally, when you organized a political event for yourself, for your party, every word that is said at that event represents who you are and the aspirations of your party and what you want to put in place if you were to be elected. This is exactly who Donald Trump is.
ABC NEWS: Do you think that this moment will galvanize Puerto Rican voters who were maybe going to sit this one out, or change the mind of those who were planning on voting for Trump?
MIRANDA: Listen, most people are going to vote for policies. We’re no different, Latinos. But what Trump did in this rally, it’s that he, the insult appeal to our heart, hurt our heart.
And those insults then mobilized people, people who were probably supporting the Democrats and Vice President Harris now said to themselves, “You know what? I was going to sit it out because I didn’t think it was important. But I don’t want this guy in the White House.”
I think the vice president said it best — we are exhausted, exhausted of this rhetoric, exhausted of this man constantly pitting one group against each other. And, and I think we are ready to move forward and close this page forever.
ABC NEWS: Mr. Luis Miranda, we thank you so much for your time and insight. Appreciate it.
(WASHINGTON) — Politicos in Washoe County, Nevada, proudly refer to their home as “the swingiest county in the swingiest state,” where voters in the sprawling and sparsely populated swath of desert might very well tilt the scales of a deadlocked presidential election in November.
But Washoe has also carved out a reputation as the epicenter of a troubling nationwide trend: County officials refusing, for one reason or another, to certify election results.
Despite a legal requirement to accept the vote tally and pass the results along to state election officials, county supervisors in at least eight states have bucked this ministerial duty in recent election cycles, according to one watchdog group, prompting concern among democracy experts that it could upend voters’ faith in the election process.
“What was a sort of wild and desperate idea in 2020 has caught on with certifying officials in the last couple of elections,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit think tank. “It won’t be a successful tactic to overturn the outcome of our election, or to stop certification. But it will cause chaos and distrust in the meantime.”
In Washoe County, two members of the county board of commissioners have emerged as symbols of the broader dispute over vote certification: Alexis Hill, the Democratic chair of the board, and Michael Clark, a Republican commissioner. During board meetings, the two sit less than ten feet from each other on the dais. But when it comes to just about everything else — including the role of the commission in certifying election results — they are miles apart.
Hill, 41, lives just blocks from downtown Reno, the county’s most populous city, with her husband and 3-year-old daughter. Most days, she commutes to the county offices on her e-bike. Clark, 73, decamps each day to his ranch near Washoe Lake, where he tends to his horses, mules and dogs. On weekends, he rides his Harley.
‘A dark afternoon’
In the commissioners’ chambers, Hill and Clark regularly tangle over budgets and policy. But no issue fires them up more than election integrity. And in July, Clark and two Republican colleagues made national headlines when they refused to certify the outcome of two local races — prompting fears of what might come to pass in November.
“It was a dark afternoon,” Hill told ABC News’ Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran. “Decisions like that, they break institutions … they make people believe that we don’t have a fair and free election.”
Clark relented a week later under “extreme duress,” he explained at a commission meeting in July. The state’s attorney general had threatened him with felony prosecution for failing to execute a duty of his office.
In an interview with ABC News’ Terry Moran, Clark said he is not an election denier, but believes county election officials have failed to properly maintain the voter rolls. Clark pointed to thousands of mail-in ballots that were sent out to registered voters but returned to the county as undeliverable, which he characterized as evidence of poor recordkeeping by the registrar of voters.
“I believe that the people that are running the registrar of voters office can’t keep accurate records,” Clark said in the interview. “When I see sloppy bookkeeping, I don’t trust it.”
Washoe County Manager Eric Brown has acknowledged that the returned ballots might represent voters who had moved, thereby complicating their ability to vote — but he said at a recent meeting that the county had upgraded its voter registration system, which he said “has enhanced tracking and certification capabilities.”
“Moving forward, keeping track of voter records is going to be — we’ll be able to do that much more accurately,” Brown said.
Clark also said his vote to not certify results in July — which was the third time in his two-year tenure on the commission that he did so — was precipitated by what election experts have called erroneous legal advice from a county attorney who told commissioners to vote their conscience.
Clark’s vote “shocked” the state’s elections chief, Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar.
“It is a ministerial duty to certify the election,” Aguilar, a Democratic, told ABC News’ Terry Moran. “If there are concerns and questions about the election — about the election process, about the election administration — [the commission has] the power to schedule an agenda item to have a conversation about how elections work.”
‘That’s just not their job’
All fifty states make election-certification by county officials a mandatory duty of their job to prevent local partisan politicians from meddling in election results. Election disputes, which frequently arise, are typically resolved through audits, recounts, and the courts.
“It may seem odd to people that [the county officials] who are certifying the election aren’t necessarily the ones that investigate all the things that happened in the election,” Morales-Doyle said. “But that’s just not their job.”
But in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, when former President Donald Trump sought to challenge the outcome of the vote, some county officials have refused to certify results.
It began in Wayne County, Michigan, where Trump reportedly pressured two county officials to not certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to the Detroit News. In the intervening election seasons, more than two dozen officials in eight states, including key swing states like North Carolina and Pennsylvania, have followed suit, according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
In Arizona, two Republican supervisors in Cochise County were charged with felonies for delaying certification of the 2022 midterm election until a court ordered them to do so. Both have pleaded not guilty and are scheduled to go to trial next year. Both also remain in their seats on the county board.
And in Georgia, a state judge this week issued a directive that county officials cannot block the certification of votes due to allegations of fraud or error, ruling that officials “have a mandatory fixed obligation to certify election results.”
‘How you undermine democracy’
Back in Nevada, election officials say they are preparing for any possible challenge to the upcoming election results.
“So is this a contagion?” Moran asked Aguilar. “Do you see this happening in other counties this time around?”
“It may, but I think we are prepared, and we have been preparing for the last 18 months to address any issue that comes up. This was one of them,” Aguilar said. “I’ve been working extremely hard with the attorney general to anticipate some of these situations.”
“We have pre-drafted legal filings — kind of like a Mad Libs, right?” Aguilar said. “You know the county, you fill in the county name, you fill in the date, you fill in the facts. And you file that thing as soon as you can before the Nevada Supreme Court.”
Experts say the failure of county officials to certify results is unlikely to succeed in delaying or altering the outcome of the presidential election. But that does not mean it should not alarm American voters.
“Every time this has been tried before, courts have put a quick end to it. And they will again this year,” Morales-Doyle said. “But what it might do is undermine the public’s faith in our process. And that’s really damaging in and of itself.”
“That’s really harmful,” he said. “Democracy works because people have faith in the outcome of their elections. If you undermine that enough, that’s how you undermine democracy.”
In Washoe County, Hill said she would “absolutely” certify the results, regardless of the outcome in the presidential race or in her own reelection race for commissioner.
“I feel like we are ready to go for this general election. And I have no concerns,” she said. “I do believe that there are really good people who are trying to hold the house together.”
Clark, for his part, offered a more reserved commitment.
“Are you going to certify an election in November?” Moran asked him.
“Well, I guess I’m going to have to,” Clark said. “I don’t want to have an argument with the attorney general. The attorney general and the state of Nevada have much deeper pockets than I have.”
ABC News’ Hannah Prince contributed to this report.
