ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
A gunman apparently hit out on Donald Trump's golf course for nearly 12 hours hoping to shoot the former president just a couple months after a would-be assassin grazed Trump's ear when he fired on the candidate at a campaign rally, which raises the question, is the Secret Service cut out for the work it's supposed to be doing? Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter with the Washington Post and author of "Zero Fail: The Rise And Fall Of The Secret Service" - good to have you back on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
CAROL LEONNIG: Thanks, Ari. It's a pleasure.
SHAPIRO: The acting director of the Secret Service called his agency's methods in this incident over the weekend effective given that Trump was not harmed. But a lot of people, from lawmakers to former agents, don't see it that way. In your view, was Sunday's incident a failure?
LEONNIG: It was a failure in one respect. I mean, clearly, the agents who were assigned to Donald Trump worked in a formation that was pretty rigorous. And the one in the front, who was one hole ahead from Donald Trump and standing on the sixth fairway, surveying the area - very keen-eyed - observed a barrel of a gun coming through the fence line. That's the success. The failure is that someone was able for 12 hours to position themselves in a place where they would have been, Ari, within feet of Donald Trump if that agent hadn't spotted the barrel of that gun. And if Donald Trump had made it to the sixth fairway, he might not have made it home alive.
SHAPIRO: So when you look at both this incident and the assassination attempt from a couple months ago, what do you see as the underlying problem? President Biden says the Secret Service needs more agents, more resources. I mean, is that the issue here?
LEONNIG: Well, it's absolutely part of the issue, Ari. I mean, the Secret Service went through a really tumultuous period in 2014, 2015, about 10 years ago. And the investigative work that I did about a series of security gaffes showed that the service was stretched too thin. Its mission had grown over time. It was protecting and now is protecting more than 40 people, not just the president of the United States. And every campaign year, the service is not just stretched too thin. It is galloping and gasping for breath. They simply don't have enough people to do everything. And on Sunday, Ari, in the wake of that July 13 shooting where Trump was grazed by a bullet on the ear - in the wake of that, the Secret Service added so many agents so that he was golfing on Sunday with what was the equivalent of a presidential detail. But that still didn't completely solve the problem - that he was golfing on what is an enormous, basically, arboretum that has public roadways all around it.
SHAPIRO: If you could wave a magic wand to make one change to the Secret Service today, what do you think would have the biggest impact on fixing some of these problems?
LEONNIG: The Secret Service sources that I speak to all the time have told me many, many things they would change. But when they are faced with that question, what they say is the Secret Service has to focus solely on protection. Its mission has grown too large. The other half of its job is investigating financial crimes, and there are a lot of federal agencies that do that now. Its mission has just gotten too large. It needs to focus, they say, solely on protection and give up this investigative mission that is draining some of its resources.
SHAPIRO: After the assassination attempt against President Trump at the campaign rally, the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned. Do you think a change of leadership can make a real difference, or are the problems deeper-seated than that?
LEONNIG: Well, already, you've seen director Rowe kind of get the memo, which is that director Cheatle basically said, OK, this was a failure, and we're really sorry, but everything's fine. And she started to sort of intimate that local police were the people to blame for what happened. The reality was very different. That defensiveness that she exhibited - not providing real-time information to members of Congress and seeming to blame local police - really basically spelled the end of her career as the director.
Director Rowe, however, still very much a 20-plus-year product of the Secret Service steeped and raised in that culture, has done something quite dramatic and said, we have to change. Something has to change - both we can't do more with less, which I've never heard a Secret Service director say - they always say, we can do it, boss - and also in saying we need to review our readiness and our protective models and figure out if there's a better way.
SHAPIRO: Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter with The Washington Post and author of "Zero Fail: The Rise And Fall Of The Secret Service." Thank you very much.
LEONNIG: Thank you, Ari. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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