Sen. Josh Hawley: Whistleblowers claim many agents had only webinar training the day Trump was shot
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., reacts to new whistleblower claims about Trump's security detail during the attempt on his life on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.'
Whistleblowers have told Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., that Secret Service personnel are "woefully unprepared" and given inadequate training to properly protect candidates – including former President Trump – in new claims regarding the assassination attempt against the Republican presidential nominee.
Hawley appeared on "Jesse Watters Primetime" Tuesday night to reveal 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, with whistleblowers allegedly saying that the videos were riddled with technical mishaps.
"Imagine 1,000 people logging onto Microsoft Teams at the same time after being informed at the last minute that everyone needed to login individually," one whistleblower told Hawley. "Once it got rolling, the Secret Service instructor couldn’t figure out how to get the audio working on the prerecorded videos [which I’m told are the same videos as last year]. All told, they restarted the videos approximately six times …. The content was not helpful."
TRUMP SHOOTING: TIMELINE OF ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
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."
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The whistleblowers further claimed that these same two-hour webinars have not been updated since the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13.
"Nothing new, nothing improved since the assassination attempt on former President Trump," one whistleblower told Hawley.
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."
The Missouri senator 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.
U.S. Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe, Jr. testifies about the attempted assassination of former President Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, during a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees in Washington, D.C., July 30. (Allison Bailey / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP via Getty Images)
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."
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"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."
Fox News' CB Cotton and Andrea Vacchiano contributed to this report.
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