Trump’s would-be assassin’s father called 911 looking for son hours after shooting: ‘We’re kind of worried’

(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump, ahead of his return to power in January, is announcing who he wants to fill Cabinet positions and other key roles inside his administration.

Trump began to roll out his nominees and appointees just days after his election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. They include some of his staunchest allies on Capitol Hill and key advisers to his 2024 campaign.

Trump will have a Republican-controlled Senate and possibly a Republican-controlled House to help usher his picks through. But he’s also urging the incoming Senate leader to embrace recess appointments, which has led to speculation some of his choices may be more controversial.

Here is a running list of whom Trump has selected, or is expected to select, to serve in his administration.

Secretary of state: Marco Rubio

Trump is expected to announce Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to be secretary of state, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Rubio is the vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Intelligence and sits on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He holds hard-line views on China, Iran and Russia, although like other Republicans he has shifted on support for Ukraine’s war effort to be more aligned with Trump.

Rubio will need to be confirmed by the Senate. Read more about Rubio’s experience here.

Department of Homeland Security secretary: Kristi Noem

Trump announced he has chosen South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to be his secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.

As Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, among Noem’s biggest roles is expected to be to oversee Trump’s border policies, including the major campaign promise of “mass deportations,” alongside Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan and White House deputy chief of staff on policy Stephen Miller.

The role would require Senate approval. Read more about Noem here.

Department of Homeland Security secretary: Kristi Noem

Trump announced he has chosen South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to be his secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.

As Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, among Noem’s biggest roles is expected to be to oversee Trump’s border policies, including the major campaign promise of “mass deportations,” alongside Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan and White House deputy chief of staff on policy Stephen Miller.

The role would require Senate approval. Read more about Noem here.

‘Department of Government Efficiency’: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

Trump announced the two men will lead what he’s calling a new “Department of Government Efficiency.”

It will not be a new federal agency, but will provide “outside of government” counsel on reforming departments and cutting waste, Trump said.

Read more about Trump’s plan here. The president-elect did not detail how this new department would be funded.

‘Border czar’: Tom Homan

Trump announced former Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan will serve as “border czar.”

He will be charged with seeing out the mass deportations Trump promised throughout his campaign.

Homan oversaw ICE under the Trump administration for a year and a half, at a time when the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy led to parents being separated from their children at the border.

“Border czar” is not an official Cabinet position, meaning it won’t need Senate confirmation. Read more about Homan here.

Chief of staff: Susie Wiles

Susie Wiles will be the first female chief of staff for any White House.

Wiles was Trump’s co-campaign manager for his 2024 run. Trump also credited her for her work on his 2016 and 2020 White House bids, though his 2024 bid ran smoother and saw fewer shake-ups.

Wiles is the daughter of legendary NFL Hall of Famer Pat Summerall. She will not require Senate confirmation to serve in the post.

Deputy chief of staff for policy: Stephen Miller

Trump announced that Stephen Miller will become his deputy chief of staff for policy.

Miller is one of Trump’s senior advisers and helped craft his hard-line immigration policies during his first term. He will be key in trying to implement Trump’s 2024 campaign pledge to mass deport migrants illegally living in the U.S.

He will not require Senate confirmation to serve in the post. Read more about Miller’s background here.

In addition to Wiles and Miller, Trump also announced other key White House figures: Dan Scavino was named assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff; James Blair was named assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public affairs; and Taylor Budowich will serve as assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for communications and personnel.

Ambassador to the United Nations: Elise Stefanik

New York Rep. Elise Stefanik has been tapped to be Trump’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Stefanik joined Congress as a moderate Republican but became one of Trump’s key defenders after his first impeachment and after his 2020 election loss. She joined House leadership in 2021 as chair of the House Republican Conference.

Stefanik made headlines this past year as she challenged university presidents on their handling of protests over the Israel-Gaza war. She’s also accused the United Nations of antisemitism over some of the resolutions passed amid the conflict.

Stefanik will have to be confirmed by the Senate to serve in the role. Read more about Stefanik here.

Director of the Central Intelligence Agency: John Ratcliffe

Trump has selected John Ratcliffe to serve as director of the CIA.

The former three-term Republican congressman from Texas served as Trump’s director of national intelligence from mid-2020 until the end of Trump’s first term.

His path to DNI wasn’t a smooth one — he was nominated to the post in 2019, but he withdrew his nomination after questions from both parties arose about his qualifications for the job and whether he had embellished his record as a federal prosecutor.

“From exposing fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation, to catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American Public,” Trump said in a statement announcing his pick. “When 51 intelligence officials were lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop, there was one, John Ratcliffe, telling the truth to the American People.”

Ratcliffe’s nomination requires Senate confirmation. Read more about him here.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator: Lee Zeldin

Trump has tapped former New York congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the EPA.

Zeldin represented Long Island’s Suffolk County in the House of Representatives for eight years before launching a failed bid for governor against Democrat Kathy Hochul. Before becoming an elected official, Zeldin was an attorney.

Zeldin has pledged to eliminate regulations at the EPA he claimed are hampering businesses. He also said he wanted to restore energy independence as well as protect access to clean air and water.

Zeldin will need Senate confirmation to serve in the role. Read more about him here.

National security adviser: Mike Waltz

Trump has picked Florida Rep. Michael Waltz to be his national security adviser.

Waltz, who was the first Green Beret elected to the House, sits on the House Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees. Before becoming an elected official, Walz served in various national security policy roles.

The national security adviser is appointed by the president with no Senate confirmation needed.

Ambassador to Israel: Mike Huckabee

Trump announced he has nominated former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel.

The role, which will need to be confirmed by the Senate, will be a key appointment as tensions remain high in the Middle East. Like David Friedman, Trump’s first ambassador to Israel, Huckabee is an outspoken supporter of the Israeli settlement movement.

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(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) — As Election Day nears, tens of millions of voters have already cast their ballots throughout the country.

Whether through mail-in ballots or early in-person polling stations, more than 68 million Americans, roughly 43% of the 2020 turnout, had voted against standing in line on Election Day as of Friday afternoon, according to data from the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Academic experts, reporters and pundits have been going through basic and limited data gleaned from the early voting numbers, trying to get clues about next week’s outcome.

That picture, however, is not exactly black and white, according to Charles Stewart, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data science lab.

“It’s like talking about the weather,” he said. “The candidates, the press, etcetera — really are trying to draw conclusions just on the face value of the data, but there really isn’t a lot there to say who is winning.”

That said, Stewart said the early voting data does provide some insights when it comes to this year’s voting patterns and overall turnout — indicators that could help explain how the election turns out.

A flip in the ways people early vote

Voting trends have shown that more people have been choosing to cast their ballots before Election Day, and this has increased in numbers over the last 30 years, but 2020 turned out to be a major outlier, according to Stewart.

In the last presidential election, 69% of the 158 million total votes were cast before Election Day either through the mail, which included mail ballots dropped off in person, or at early voting poll sites, according to data from MIT.

Some 43% of the 2020 early votes came from mail ballots, according to the data.

Stewart said the COVID-19 pandemic forced many voters, who were already heavily engaged and wanted to be safe, to opt into using mail ballots or smaller voting lines if available.

“There was a speculation of what would happen with the shift once the pandemic was over,” he said.

However, in this year’s early voting there’s been a drop in voters choosing mail-in voting, Stewart said.

“The main trend I’m seeing is that the interest of voting by mail has shifted to voting in-person,” Stewart said.

He noted that shift is apparent in Georgia, which has seen record early voting numbers, with over 3.8 million ballots cast as of Friday. Roughly 92% of those were cast at in-person polling places and the rest via mail, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

Stewart said some states, including swing states Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona, only offer early voting through in-person absentee options. Under this option, a voter must request an absentee ballot, fill it out, and then deposit it in either a ballot box or at a designated location, and they are counted as a mail ballot voter.

Some voters may not have the time or energy to go through those extra steps to cast their ballots early, and are likely going to vote in-person Stewart said.

“If you have to vote early in person you have to figure out where that precinct is but you have to find out which is closer to your house or errands. With voting by mail, you have to take the effort to apply, to fill it out and return it and hope that the mail is delivered on time,” he said. “With Election Day voting you likely have a polling site that is much closer to you.”

Early-voting method preference hasn’t the only thing that’s seen a flip, according to Stewart.

Partisan numbers do not give any indication of outcome

Stewart said historical trends show that the majority of early voters made their decisions a long time ago and are likely politically active.

This year’s data shows that to be the case, he said, bit noted a major change in partisan turnout in several battleground states, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Registered Republicans have seen a higher early voting turnout in battlegrounds Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina in this election compared to 2024 as of Friday, according to the data.

Typically, Democrats have had an advantage in early voting. However, Trump has pushed his supporters to cast their vote earlier and that appears to have an impact, Stewart said.

While Republican officials have been touting these higher numbers as a sign of growing support, Stewart warned there is more nuance to the data.

He noted it shows, so far, that a large number of the registered Republicans who cast their votes eary came from people who voted on Election Day in 2020 and were not new voters.

Stewart said this would mean there would be fewer Republican voters casting their ballots on Election Day and thus their votes may not be reported until much later on election night or even for days afterward.

In 2020, many swing states saw their Democratic tallies rise throughout the election night and into the week, creating a “red mirage” effect on the outcome.

That mirage and “blue wave” could be muted this time around, Stewart said.

“Whatever the blue shift is, there will probably be less of a steep slope to it,” he said.

What do gender, race say about the early vote

Democrats have been touting the gender gap as a factor in their favor in the early voting numbers, as over 54% of women have cast their vote as of Friday, according to the University of Florida data.

Stewart said that assumption is not noteworthy.

Women have always been the majority of the electorate in presidential elections, going as far back as 1980, according to the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Stewart said this is also true of early voters.

“It’s not always obvious to the public that there’s always been a gender gap,” he said.In 2020, many swing states saw their Democratic tallies rise throughout the election night and into the week, creating a “red mirage” effect on the outcome.

That mirage and “blue wave” could be muted this time around, Stewart said.

“Whatever the blue shift is, there will probably be less of a steep slope to it,” he said.

What do gender, race say about the early vote

Democrats have been touting the gender gap as a factor in their favor in the early voting numbers, as over 54% of women have cast their vote as of Friday, according to the University of Florida data.

Stewart said that assumption is not noteworthy.

Women have always been the majority of the electorate in presidential elections, going as far back as 1980, according to the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Stewart said this is also true of early voters.

“It’s not always obvious to the public that there’s always been a gender gap,” he said.

When it comes to race, white voters are more likely to cast their votes by mail than Black voters, according to the MIT data.

Stewart said this stems from traditions going back to the civil rights movement.

“African Americans fought and sometimes died for being able to march into the voting booth. That’s been instilled in the community,” he said.

This practice is one factor in large numbers of Black voters heading to in-person early voting poll sites in states such as Georgia and South Carolina, where that option is available.

Churches, civil rights groups and other organizations with ties to the Black community have been pushing voters to head to the early voting polls, using campaigns such as “souls to the polls” so that they can avoid any complications on Election Day.

Groups in Georgia in particular have stressed voting early to circumvent some of the restrictive voting laws that have been put in place since the 2020 election.

As of Friday evening, more than 1 million Black voters have cast their ballots, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

“The mobilization efforts have clearly proven effective,” Stewart said.

Signs point to high turnout

Stewart said the one definite conclusion that can be drawn from the early voting data is that this year’s overall turnout will be “on par” with 2020’s, which was the highest voter turnout by percentage in over 100 years.

“It could be the high 160 (million),” he estimated.

Stewart said that the early-voting trends have shown that voters under 25 have not yet voted and they will typically line up on Election Day.

“Those populations are really heavily represented on Election Day,” he said.

Stewart reiterated that with the pandemic over, a good number of the 2020 early voters will likely shift back to Election Day voting, especially if it presents itself as the easier option for their locations and schedules.

As for the future, Steward predicted that the rise in Republican voters voting early will continue in future cycles along with the overall trend of the electorate opting for early voting.

“The data is showing this organic increase in early voting even after the pandemic,” he said. “Voters want more options, and they will seriously consider voting if they have more choices.”

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