EXCLUSIVE: President Donald Trump was “one door away” from danger at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a GOP lawmaker said, as he demands answers from the Secret Service over what he described as a major security lapse.
House Homeland Security Committee member Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., who previously investigated security failures at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally where Trump was targeted, said the latest incident raises similar concerns about gaps in Secret Service protection.
Gimenez, who examined the Butler site firsthand, told Fox News Digital that security at the Washington Hilton — where the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was held and where President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 — showed troubling vulnerabilities as well.
Gimenez said things have changed since then in some positive ways, as crowds can’t regularly get as close to a president as John Hinckley Jr. was able to when he attempted to kill Reagan, reportedly to impress actress Jodie Foster.
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“Mr. Brady got injured pretty severely — but it was a long time ago and things tend to kind of fade away into history and from memory. So I am not sure [of an apples-to-apples comparison],” he said, pivoting back to examining any “glaring holes” in the security posture at Trump’s event.
“If there were, why, and why weren’t they caught? And who is responsible for that? And does the Secret Service have the training needed in order to account for and to make [adjustments].”
He questioned whether the Secret Service has the training and preplanning needed to prevent similar threats.
Gimenez dismissed any notions that Hilton itself was liable for the breaches, saying that when a president is threatened, the onus falls on his detail.
“It’s not the job of the Hilton hotel to protect the president and so, again, it all falls on Secret Service,” he said while underlining that the rank-and-file officers are very brave and that they all did their jobs Saturday and stopped suspect Cole Allen quickly with no injuries beyond an agent hit in his vest.
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“My question is how in the world did that would-be assassin get that far, where he was basically one door away from God knows what? Those are questions that need to be answered.”
Gimenez said that for events such as the WHCA Dinner, “you have to account for the what-if,” noting that the Secret Service may go through hours and days of “boredom” but need to be ready for an instantaneous threat.
“That doesn’t mean you’re going to think of every contingency, but you should be thinking of most and make it very, very difficult for any would-be assassin to get one door away from the president.”
“Those are the concerns I have now – and those are the concerns I had in Butler.”
He said that in both cases there were things that went both right and wrong.
Efforts to stop Allen went right, but allowing someone like him to get all the way to the sub-basement ballroom unfettered went wrong, Gimenez said.
When asked about his Butler special committee and whether a similar panel will be formed now, Gimenez said he’s heard rumblings about such, while reiterating that members of his staff had no problem getting into the various pre-parties without passing magnetometers or additional security, showing there remains a lot to examine.
He said he expects any panel to demand a classified briefing with Secret Service brass, and give “situational awareness” of the agency’s posture that night.
“It’s frankly rather amazing that we don’t have a facility like that in the White House for state dinners, et cetera, for the most powerful country in the world, right?”
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In that regard, Gimenez said Trump is “ahead of the game” in a lot of areas and that his ballroom plans for the East Wing may have directly mitigated threats posed by using a public hotel in the business district with multiple entrances.
At the same time, he said procedures must be examined to see whether the Secret Service has fallen into a pattern of “what used to work in the past is good enough for what’s working and what threats are today.”
“We need to get to the bottom of it and see how the Secret Service is adapting to the new threat environment, which changes every single day.”
After former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle left the agency following the Butler failures, Gimenez said it will be important to look at what improvements, if any, have been undertaken by the new leadership in the two years since, analyzing their own worthiness.
On the ballroom debate, Gimenez said anyone who examines the plans seriously and apolitically will find that this is exactly the kind of solution needed for such threats.
“Putting my doctor hat on, I will say that the validity to those lawsuits is based on Trump Derangement Syndrome – So [critics] need help, OK… The White House, which is a site of many official functions, and especially state dinners, when we’re bringing in dignitaries and heads of states from around the world, needs a ballroom.”
He said the “temporary tent” set up in the garden is an embarrassment for a first-world country. Fox News Digital reached out to the Secret Service for comment.
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Brennan contributed to this report.
