Secret Service Accused of Inadequate Training and Preparation to Protect Candidates

The Secret Service has been accused of being "woefully unprepared" to protect candidates, including former President Trump, in the wake of the assassination attempt against the Republican presidential nominee.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) revealed whistleblowers' claims that when Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents were reassigned to work on the protective details, they were given a single two-hour webinar on Microsoft Teams. The videos were pre-recorded and riddled with technical mishaps.

The Secret Service responded in a statement that it "respects the role of oversight. To date, we have provided over 1,500 pages of responsive documentation to Congress and have made employees available for transcribed interviews. These efforts will continue as our desire to learn from this failure and ensure that it never happens again is unwavering."

The whistleblowers further claimed that these same two-hour webinars have not been updated since the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13. Other HSI agents, who worked the fateful July 13 Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, told Hawley's office that they "only receive[d] one power-point presentation for training."

Senator Hawley blasted the government agency for their "nightmare" handling of the assassinations attempt that rocked the nation. "This is a nightmare, the only reason we know about this stuff is because of whistleblowers," Hawley said.

The allegations surrounding the HSI agent's lack of training and preparation comes after Hawley's office has continued to communicate with whistleblowers about the Trump rally shooting and what went wrong in order for would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks to gain access to the AGR building rooftop that evening with an AR-15 rifle.

Hawley's office previously claimed that the lead site agent was known to be inexperienced and "incompetent." "The site agent, the lead agent, was known to the Trump campaign to be inexperienced, to be ineffectual, to be, frankly, incompetent at their job," Hawley previously said in an interview on "Jesse Watters Primetime." "I'm also told by whistleblowers that on that day, she was not enforcing the normal security protocols."

"She was not checking people's IDs. She did not use Secret Service agents," Hawley added. "Most of the agents there that day were not Secret Service agents. They were Homeland Security agents.