It’s said it’s hard to prove a negative.
 
When an event is prevented from occurring, that statistic is rarely reported and the public doesn’t know what might have been.

Mike Succi spent 23 years as a member of the Secret Service and in the Oval Office with the George W. Bush and Barack Obama teams. During that time the goal was to keep the protection of public officials out of the news by stopping threats before they happened. And the Secret Service is very good, which is why attacks on political figures are so rare.

“For every attempt, there are hundreds that look for an angle, that look for a weakness,” said Succi, who now runs Succi Investigations, which offers an array of services from personal protection, surveillance, and site surveys, to digital and forensic investigations. “We train for that one percent,” he said of the Secret Service and stopping those who carry out an attack on a public figure. 

The greatest successes of the Secret Service are from the attacks that never occur.Thomas Matthew Crooks, who wounded former President Donald Trump on Saturday, July 13, with a rifle shot in rural Pennsylvania, was that exception.

“What failed,” Succi said of the Secret Service and law enforcement protection, “was the advance work.”

Succi sat down with Behind the Badge to discuss the Secret Service, how it operates, its strategies and tactics in protection and also what failed at the farm near Butler, Pa.

Violence as old as politics

As long as there have been governments and politics, there have been attacks and assassinations. In the United States, presidents have been in the crosshairs ever since house painter Richard Lawrence attempted to shoot President Andrew Jackson with two pistols that misfired. Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy were shot to death while in office. Ronald Reagan was the last sitting president wounded in 1981.

While there have been countless attempts, plots, rumors, and contemplated attacks in the intervening years, the Secret Service remarkably has kept every President and presidential candidate from harm. It is a testament to the agency’s scrupulous training, procedures, and policies over the years. The best sign of its effectiveness was in how little it was mentioned.

And then came the attempt on Trump.

Succi notes that with better planning during set-up of the venue, equipment and banners could easily have been shifted to eliminate the line of sight from the building where Crooks fired to the stage. There was also a failure to react to the sightings of the assassin and his suspicious behavior before the event.

Succi noted another factor was the Trump campaign’s tendency to favor outdoor settings, rather than arenas and stadiums. Such venues are less expensive to set up, but harder to protect.

Regardless, Succi says the Secret Service had the needed assets to do the job.  

Although he praises the counter-snipers for quickly reacting to Crooks, he notes that they are a last resort not the first.

“We have a policy of prevention,” he said, rather than engage in shootouts. “We’re trained to get the protectee out and safe.”

In the aftermath, Succi says the Secret Service will learn and be better.

“We’ll be studying this case for years,” Succi said. However, he says the fault is with his former agency, not the police.

“This was a Secret Service site,” he said. “The finger pointing comes back at us, as it should.”