‘Was something amiss?’: Ex federal agents rip Secret Service for handling of Trump rally and shooting response

The Secret Service needs to act “extremely quickly” in reviewing its protective strategies following an attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life, one former agent who served on Barack Obama’s security detail says.

The agency will now face its own reckoning in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, which saw the candidate’s ear bloodied by a gunman taking aim from a nearby roof.

Numerous groups have raised questions about how the Secret Service didn’t stop the shooting and how agents responded in its aftermath.

As Trump, President Joe Biden and long-shot third-party contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continue to ramp up public appearances in advance of Election Day, time is unreservedly of the essence for Secret Service officials to get their house in order, former agent Jonathan Wackrow said.

A “mission-assurance review” will be an immediate internal focus, in an effort to analyze the agency’s playbook, Wackrow told The Independent.

“Was something amiss? Was there a communications issue? What were the precipitating events that this shooter took to get up onto the roof? The next few months are a sprint for the Secret Service, the candidates are going to be doing rallies, multiple events, so the Secret Service has to ensure their methodology and approach doesn’t need to be changed,” Wackrow said. “Or if they do, they need to enact those changes extremely quickly.”

The Republican National Convention is set to take place in Milwaukee from July 15 through the 18, with Trump being officially nominated as the party’s candidate.

According to Wackrow, who spent five years protecting Obama and the First Lady, the Secret Service must now “make sure their protective methodology was