By Suzanne Bowdey

“It doesn’t have to be like this.” That was the message James Copenhaver desperately wanted Americans to know after Thomas Crooks changed his life forever. The retired grandfather, one of the two surviving victims of the Donald Trump assassination attempt, says he’s seen a lot in his 74 years. But nothing prepared him for the violence of July 13. “He’s been around a long time,” his attorney told reporters when James was released from the hospital on Sunday. “He’s witnessed a lot take place in this country. And this is definitely one of the worst things that he’s experienced as an American.”

For one thing, the 74-year-old can’t believe that “the political divide in this country has become so great” that people are “firing bullets into crowds.” Copenhaver, who has a long road to recovery after being shot in the arm and abdomen, still insists he is “unafraid to voice his support for Trump.” He refuses to let “those who disagree with his views silence him.”

Thinking back on that day, his lawyer Joseph Feldman says Copenhaver remembers hearing or even seeing something “kind of whizz past them.” At the first jolt of pain, he looked down at his arm and saw the blood. At that point, Feldman explained, “he didn’t even realize that he had been shot a second time.” He was in shock. “There was a lot of pandemonium. People were screaming. No one really quite knew what was going on right away.”

And, to most of the country’s disgust, no one really seems to know what happened now. After two and a half weeks, the U.S. Secret Service still seems shockingly ignorant about how a 20-year-old novice, who they’d already identified as a suspicious character — managed to climb up a building in plain sight (Copenhaver’s own video even shows Crooks running across the roof), and nearly kill the former president.

Outrage over the Secret Service’s failures boiled over in a Senate hearing Tuesday, despite Acting Director Ronald Rowe’s openly contrite posture. Admitting he “cannot defend” the rally failures by his team, senators blasted the catastrophic decisions he made with former Director Kimberly Cheatle, including “denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.” In fact, it was “Rowe’s decision alone,” some assert, “to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.

Making matters worse for Rowe, internal emails from a counter-sniper to leadership were leaked to the press, exposing a longtime pattern of shortcomings and lax supervision. "This agency NEEDS to change, if not now, WHEN?” the sniper wrote to the agency’s Uniformed Division, according to the email obtained by RealClearPolitics. “… [W]e all SHOULD expect another attempt to happen before November.”

The message continues: “Failure is not an option, and on 7/13/24, WE failed. Not because of commitment or sense of dedication. But because our SUPERVISORS (aka leadership) knew better and thought our concerns were less than important. The motto of the USSS … CYA [Cover Your A**]. And every supervisor is doing it right now.”

Instead of getting to the bottom of the agency’s failure, most senators felt like the hearing only raised more questions. “What they’re doing to themselves is they’re making the public feel like there is a cover-up,” Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told a local radio station. “Think about this: when somebody doesn’t give you information, what’s your first reaction? Wonder what they’re hiding. That’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s been 18 days, no press conferences.” It’s no wonder, he shook his head, since they can’t seem “to answer some basic questions. … So what they’re doing to themselves is they’re making people feel like, ‘Oh gosh, there’s something to hide here.’”

This is all information, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) argued, that Congress “should have known within hours.” Obviously, the agency doesn’t think it’s accountable to anyone, he fumed, because “their officials just gave us the big middle finger.”

On “Washington Watch” Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) echoed the lack of accountability. “I mean, how many more questions do you need to ask before somebody [gets] fired? I mean, the system failed. It’s a massive system failure. Individual members of the Secret Service, the president’s protective detail, rushed to his aid as quick as they could, but everything failed. How can you get within 130 yards of the president? Get eight rounds off from a rooftop? [This was a] 20-year-old guy without any military training. … The only deterrence that really matters in these things is for people to lose their job,” he argued, adding, “If you’re in the military and you did this, you’d probably be court-martialed.”

Graham pointed to the other deficiencies in the FBI and Secret Service, including the fact that they can’t even seem to break into Crooks’s phones. “You know what they’ve done with these phones?” he asked Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “They’ve given them to the Israelis, hoping they can break the encryption.” As far as he’s concerned, this is dangerous where combatting terrorism and crime are concerned, “a wake-up call,” Graham admitted.

As to whether anti-Trump bias may have fueled some of Secret Service’s carelessness, Graham couldn’t say. “You know, I don’t know if there were resources denied. I have no evidence to suggest that there was a political decision to not resource President Trump because of his politics. But, you know, how smart do you have to be to understand that this failed at every level? I mean, isn’t it stunning? I still can’t quite absorb what happened here.” Frankly, he shook his head, “If people don’t lose their job over this, what would get you fired at the Secret Service?”

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) is less convinced that the agency didn’t intentionally inject ideology into their decision-making. “Nobody wants to believe the worst, to suspect the worst, about what happens within government,” he said. “But when they lied to us repeatedly, then when they refused to answer the most basic questions, when they almost willfully declined to take any of the most basic precautions in order to protect the president — the former president … one has to wonder.”

“Remember, King David didn’t personally kill Uriah the Hittite,” Lee pointed out soberly. “But he let him go out into a battlefield where he knew there was an imminent risk of great bodily injury. And he made sure he didn’t have adequate protection. We’ve got to get to the bottom of these questions to make sure that Donald Trump was not intended to be a Uriah the Hittite.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.