Maeve

The reason the panoply of federal agencies missed blaring signs like these was not that they didn’t have resources. Their problem is that led the Secret Service to allow a would-be assassin to come within an inch of killing Donald Trump at a rally in Butler Pennsylvania last year: mission creep. In a devastating review that went largely unnoticed, a Department of Homeland Security-appointed bipartisan panel blamed the Butler shooting on the Secret Service’s authorities not directly related to its protective mission. “The Secret Service’s dual mission has placed nearly unbearable demands on the agency,” the report found, expressing “extreme skepticism” for the agency’s second mission: “In this regard, the Panel expresses extreme skepticism that many of the Service’s non-protective (investigative) missions meaningfully contribute to the Service’s protective capability and is concerned that they may materially distract from it” and that this “may require shedding certain peripheral responsibilities like financial fraud and counterfeiting investigations, and perhaps all criminal investigative work that is not directly tethered to the protective mission.”

Almost like the system was rotten from the beginning.