3/5 or 6
The physical venue has to be thoroughly, I mean thoroughly, checked, for every event. Physical plans of the venue, including, to my knowledge, architectural plans, are sent to the White House and to campaign staff, and are available to both the advance team and to the security team. (Again, this process is recalled from my experience 24 years ago. It may have changed). The route from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the venue, from the venue to the hotel, from the hotel to the airport, is checked by multiple layers of the staff of this daily meeting as well as by security services.Ingress and egress to and from the venue must be similarly checked by the Secret Service; roofs and basements are checked; perimeters and parking lots are checked. A security plan, which includes what to do in an emergency, is devised by the Secret Service for that specific venue, and then signed off by the Secret Service in advance, and only then can the event be placed on the schedule….
If the venue is not easy enough fully to secure, the Secret Service will say so.That is a crucial, central part of the Secret Service’s job: informing the White House staff and the campaign staff when something they hope to plan is not safe.If that happens, the staff cannot overrule the Secret Service, to my knowledge. Even POTUS or FLOTUS, to my knowledge, cannot overrule the Secret Service. If an event or venue is not safe, and if the Secret Service says so, this is not an informal, easily-misunderstood verbal back and forth,but it is quite formalized— the scheduler cannot okay an unsafe venue for final placement on the schedule.
This requirement — to vet all attendees near “the principal,” and to clear the safety of a venue or event — can cause a lot of friction at the daily meetings. Everyone at that daily meeting has an agenda and wants his or her own event, or an event serving his or her own donors or constituents, or one showcasing his or her policy goals, to be placed on the all-important POTUS or FLOTUS schedule.
The venue and surroundings will also be physically checked by the security team in advance of the event.The “advance” team — a separate group — also checks it in advance. (Hence the name “advance team.”) This happens days before. If there is a problem, that previous “advance” trip is intended to surface and remedy it.
All this protocol means that the perimeter, the parking lot, the rooftop, the basements, the stage, the bleachers, even the security fence that videos show, =in Butler PA, prevented police from detaining Crooks in advance of his weapon being fired — should all have been physically checked and okayed in advance, all the way up the chain of command for the Secret Service. Standard SOP in this way prevents any Keystone Cops-type scrambling around impediments such as barrier fences, any confusion, and any plaintive cries of “What do we do now?” – all of which we saw and heard in Butler, PA. Evidence of this prior planning is the diamond-sharp, thoroughly-drilled, hyper-certain coordinated reaction of Secret Service in 1981, to the shooting of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley. This earlier Secret Service response took President Reagan out of the shooter’s range in seconds, not, as in this recent case, many long minutes==. See the difference for yourself.
The assertion now by Secret Service that local police in Butler PA were in charge of securing any part of the venue, is baffling to anyone who has worked in or with a White House advance team. That is not how anything related to Secret Security operates, to my knowledge. If the SOP has changed in the last 20 years,then US Secret Service procedures have dramatically deteriorated. Or else — someone who does not want to secure US “principals” to the traditional standard, or at least not consistently, is now in charge.
Having seen how closely an event is scrutinized in advance, and how many layers ofstaffers in both the White House and the campaign need to sign off on it, let us look at the First Lady.
FLOTUS chose to speak at 5 pm on July 13, 2024, at North Pittsburgh, at a closed event of 200, at a casino. 5 PM was the exact time ofPresident Trump’s speech in Butler PA. FLOTUS’ event was 54 minutes away from President Trump’s.
(Vice President Kamala Harris also spoke in Pennsylvania that day, at an event broadcast from 1-5 pm, at the Philadelphia Convention Center, at an APIAVotes (“Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote” Town Hall. Press around this event describes VP Harris as “our nation’s first Asian American Vice President.”)
https://www.frontpagemag.com/__trashed-29/