After two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump, there are still plenty of questions about Secret Service protection. A former Secret Service agent joined Liz Collin on her latest podcast to weigh in on his concerns with barely two weeks left until Election Day.
The conversation happened just as the Secret Service pledged to make reforms after a critical report of their work was released last week.
Mike Olson is a former agent with the Secret Service with more than two decades of law enforcement experience. He has also worked on some assignments on Trump’s detail in the past. Olson now runs 360 Security Services. Olson explained how he remains “very concerned given what’s happened this year. I think there’s a lot of time left in the campaign season. I mean, weeks in the world of Secret Service and protection and campaign cycles is an incredibly long time.”
Olson expressed shock and frustration after Trump’s first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“It was alarming the snowball effect, the trickle down of a series of perfect failures that all lined up perfectly to allow this assassination attempt to happen like it did. If you would have told me that somebody ended up having a gun at the site and they were spotted 10 minutes before they lost him, but they ultimately found them and placed them under arrest, that wouldn’t have surprised me because the Secret Service has dealt with those types of situations along with their local partners for years and years … Many times in the past, we’ve had these scenarios where the public just doesn’t hear about them because you don’t actually have a situation where somebody has successfully attempted to assassinate a former president like they did,” Olson said.
Safety and security: communication is key
Olson further explained how communication is key: “The communication breakdown is something that has existed, frustratingly, since 9-11 and before. The Secret Service operates on a totally separate network and encrypted network. It’s not able to communicate directly with local and state law enforcement that the Secret Service relies so heavily upon to do these total protection operations of candidates when they come into various state and local jurisdictions. That’s a massive problem that’s existed for a long time. But the way that it’s supposed to be remedied is through the use of a common command post or a common security room where all the various entities that are involved in the protection come together and are supposed to be communicating very proactively and aggressively with what’s going on out there. And it appeared that all of that broke down at every phase and ultimately we ended up with the tragic situation that we did where somebody lost their life.”
Olson also couldn’t believe what took place just two months later near a golf course in Florida that also exposed vulnerabilities in keeping Trump safe.
“Given the threat environment that exists out there towards former president Trump, especially as a candidate, and in light of the assassination attempt on July 13, and also in light of the fact that we’ve heard publicly, which means the information that exists confidentially or through classified means, about Iran posing a threat to Donald Trump would have suggested to me that at that point they should have ramped up everything,” Olson said.
“And supposedly, it wasn’t known on his schedule that Donald Trump was going to go and play a round of golf at the golf course that morning. The problem is, and having actually worked on some assignments on his detail before I retired, it’s not a secret to anybody out there that he golfs a lot and that he goes golfing when he’s in Florida.”
A concerning shift in Secret Service protection?
Former agents like Olson are concerned about recent comments from the acting director of the U.S. Secret Service, who said the agency needs to move from a reactive model to a readiness model.
Olson explained how hearing the comments was “like listening to a foreign language.” He pointed out how “the Secret Service is an advanced or risk assessment or threat assessment agency, meaning based on threats, based on profiles of individuals, that all dictates the kind of protection you prepare for ahead of time.”
In pinpointing a key problem, Olson explained that “you don’t ever want to have that internal, that interior shift, that inner circle of defense to have to go into action. That’s literally the last line of defense. So to hear the words that the Secret Service needs to move from a reactionary model was not even part of the lexicon and the Secret Service that I was a part of. It was all about prevention, proactive, preventing bad things from happening before they happen.”
Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
