ARKANSAS, USA — After Saturday's assassination attempt on a former president, questions have been raised about the security of the campaign rally.
A former Secret Service agent who worked for the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations is now a consultant for an Arkansas-based security firm.
Bill Gage lives in Virginia, but he is a senior security consultant for SafeHaven Security Group in Rogers, Arkansas. He served as a special agent with the Secret Service in 2002 and served on the Counter Assault Team from 2007 to 2015.
"The hundreds if not thousands of Secret Service events I've been to, in every single event, there's some sort of suspicious activity," Gage said. "Whether someone reports there's somebody with a gun, there's an unattended package somewhere that looks suspicious that might be a bomb."
When he first saw the footage of former President Donald Trump being shot at, Gage said he thought the shots came from inside the event space.
"I assumed that someone had smuggled a firearm somehow, maybe a 3D-printed gun, or something you might see out of the movies like a wood gun or something," he said.
Gage said the investigation into how the rooftop wasn't secured will reveal how a lapse like that happened, but he believes the presence of Secret Service agents and local officers could have been stronger.
"It's an outdoor event, thousands of people there, it's a lot of ground for them to cover," he said. "From what I understand, looking at the videos and pictures, there were only two teams. That's a lot of people to cover for just two teams."
Gage debunked the online conspiracies accusing the Biden Administration of scaling back Trump's protection.
"That's just not the case," he said. "There is a procedure that's in place where the FBI director, the secretary of homeland security, the DHS secretary, different components of the government, senior members of the US government, they meet and they make an educated decision based on the threat level, crowd size. They take a number of factors into consideration."
With several calling on the director of the Secret Service to resign, Gage said placing all the blame on her is unfair.
"She's going to be called before Congress," he said. "She's going to have a lot of tough questions to answer, and we'll see what she has to say, but to blame this all on the director is unfair."
Gage said he believes the Secret Service agents who covered Trump executed their protect and cover strategy well.
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