Trump transition live updates: Waltz eyed as national security adviser, sources say

(WASHINGTON) — There were many mistakes made on the day of the July assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump by the Secret Service, but an independent review by the Department of Homeland Security revealed systemic issues within the organization and found that without reforms to the agency, “another Butler can and will happen again.”

In the aftermath of the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas assigned a panel of four former law enforcement and national security officials to examine what went wrong, and how they recommend the Secret Service moves forward after the attempt on former president’s life.

“The Secret Service does not perform at the elite levels needed to discharge its critical mission,” the letter addressed to Secretary Mayorkas said, which was included in the report. “The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved.”

On the independent panel are former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, former Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip, former Maryland State Police Superintendent David Mitchell and former Deputy National Security Adviser Fran Townsend.

The scathing 35-page report from the independent panel said the findings illustrated “deeper concerns” within the U.S. Secret Service.

“The Panel has observed that many of the Secret Service personnel involved in the events of July 13 appear to have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions, or opportunities for improvement,” the report said. “July 13 represents a historic security failure by the Secret Service which almost led to the death of a former president and current nominee and did lead to the death of a rally attendee.”

The panel said that even a “superficial” level of reflection would have been meaningful.

Plaguing the Secret Service are “corrosive cultural attitudes” regarding resourcing events – a “do more with less” attitude, according to the report.

The report also found there was a troubling “lack of critical thinking” by Secret Service personnel “before, during and after” the assassination attempt.

“A prominent instance of this is the fact that personnel had been read into significant intelligence regarding a long range threat by a foreign state actor against former President Trump, but failed to ensure that the AGR building was secured despite its proximity to the rally stage and the obvious high angle line of sight issues it presented,” the report found.

Other instances “revealed a surprising lack of rigor in considering the specific risks posed to particular individual protectees.”

The report said, for example, Trump, though not formally the Republican nominee at the time, had essentially clinched it months before and thus the Secret Service’s approach was formulaic “rather than an individualized assessment of risk.”

The failure to take ownership of planning the Butler rally and the lack of cohesion with state and local law enforcement during the planning of events, a lack of experienced agents to perform “certain critical security tasks,” a lack of auditing mechanisms to learn from mistakes in the field, a lack of training facilities, and a lack of agents feeling comfortable to speak up.

In particular, the operational tempo for younger agents who came up during the COVID-19 pandemic was slower than most election years, and thus those agents did not get as much experience in the field as agents would normally get.

The panel is calling for new leadership at the Secret Service – saying the agency needs a change with people from outside the agency.

“Many of the issues that the Panel has identified throughout this report, particularly regarding the Panel’s “deeper concerns,” are ultimately attributable, directly or indirectly, to the Service’s culture,” the report said. “A refreshment of leadership, with new perspectives, will contribute to the Service’s resolution of those issues.”

Among the other recommendations the panel made are a restructuring of the agency’s protective office, new training initiatives, new communication technologies that are more reliable and an evaluation “of the Secret Service’s method for how it resources protectees to ensure that it is risk-based, and not overly formulaic or reliant on a protectee’s title for making resource determinations.”

“The Panel also recognizes the bravery and selflessness exhibited by Secret Service agents and officers who put themselves in harm’s way to protect their protectees, including in Butler after Crooks fired at former President Trump and others. However, bravery and selflessness alone, no matter how honorable, are insufficient to discharge the Secret Service’s no-fail protective mission.”

Specific to July 13, the panel’s findings are in line with the Secret Service’s mission assurance review that came out last month.

Some of the findings are an absence of law enforcement to secure the AGR building where Thomas Matthew Crooks eventually fired from, the failure to mitigate the line of site from that building, having two communications rooms, the failure of anyone to encounter Crooks despite spotting him 90 minutes before Trump took the stage, the failure to inform the former president’s detail and the drone detection system not working.

The panel recommends the Service has integrated communications, a mandatory situation report when a protectee arrives, better counter-drone technologies and an advanced line of site mitigations.

A footnote in the report says the second assassination attempt against Trump didn’t impact the panel’s work but might’ve reinforced the report.

The panel recommends the Service implement the Butler reforms no later than March 31, 2025, and the broader reforms by the end of 2025.

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(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — During an all-staff call earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign leadership urged staffers not to speak with reporters and addressed concerns about the future after her loss to Donald Trump in the election, two people on the call told ABC News.

Campaign Chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks implored staffers not to speak with reporters, with Fulks saying they still needed staffers “staying in this fight.”

One source noted that the call gave the same “gaslighty” feeling they received after President Joe Biden left the race in July. In an all-staff call following Biden’s departure from the race, staffers were caught off guard and were only given a one-minute heads up that he was exiting the race before he made it public.

ABC News has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on the matter.

The call, which was shared more widely on Thursday, was a recording from an initial call that the campaign held on Wednesday following Harris’ concession speech at Howard University.

During the call, O’Malley Dillon told staffers that they ran a “very close” race. She said that state teams knocked on more than 50 million doors in the final days before Election Day and their field operation helped the Senate races in those states. O’Malley Dillon teared up toward the end of the call, a source confirmed.

Harris spoke on that call, noting that this moment “sucks,” a source told ABC News.

“We all just speak truth, why don’t we, right? There’s also so much good that has come of this campaign,” Harris said, according to the source.

Harris had a hopeful tone in her message to supporters at Howard on Wednesday, too, saying “sometimes the fight takes a while. … The important thing is don’t ever give up.”

During the call, leadership spoke about the next general steps for staffers and connecting with people for their next jobs.

Both sources noted how shocked they still felt about the loss, particularly with how wide the margins were in the battleground states.

Both sources said the moment on “The View” when the vice president wasn’t able to differentiate herself from Biden as a moment the entire campaign felt was a big mistake.

Last month on the show, when asked what she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years, Harris said, “there is not a thing that comes to mind,” before citing, much later in the interview, her pledge to put a Republican in her Cabinet.

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(PHOENIX) — President Joe Biden was in Arizona on Friday to apologize to Native Americans for the federal government forcing Indian children into boarding schools where the White House said they were abused and deprived of their cultural identity.

Departing the White House Thursday, Biden said he was going to Arizona “to do something that should have been done a long time ago.”

He said he would make “a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years.”

The White House called his trip to Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix — his first to Indian Country as president — “historic.”

Officials said he will discuss the Biden-Harris administration’s record of delivering for tribal communities, including keeping his promise to visit the swing state, which is happening close to Election Day.

“The president also believes that to usher in the next era of the Federal-Tribal relationships we need to fully acknowledge the harms of the past,” the White House said. 

“For over 150 years, the federal government ran boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native children from their homes to boarding schools often far away. Native children at these schools endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and, as detailed in the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report by the Department of the Interior (DOI), at least 973 children died in these schools,” the White House said.

“The federally-run Indian boarding school system was designed to assimilate Native Americans by destroying Native culture, language, and identity through harsh militaristic and assimilationist methods,” it said.

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