Following the apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at his golf club on Sunday, opinions remain divided on whether the suspect acted alone or may have received inside assistance.
“Someone with access to the president’s schedule may have shared that information beyond their trusted circles,” retired Lt. Col. Darin Gaub told NTD.
The Secret Service said that Trump’s Sunday golf round was an “off the record movement,” not on his planned schedule. This raises questions about how the suspect Ryan Routh knew Trump would be there.
Gaub said his “main concern” was that the situation might be an inside job, believing someone might have tipped off the gunman, “either directly to the suspect or via some other means.”
“There’s no way to have that kind of information without having access to closely guarded information,” Gaub said. “So I’m concerned about information leaking out that led to this.”
In addition, he said the golf course has a security vulnerability.
“I’ve walked the perimeter of that golf course before, and driven around it before as well, and it is clearly something that can easily be walked up to. I’ve noticed that years ago,” he said. “A big concern of mine was that anybody really could walk up to the fence line of that golf course and be unseen.”
Martin County Sheriff William D. Snyder said in a press conference, “If he’s the lone gunman, President Trump is that much safer because we have him. But if he’s part of a conspiracy, then this whole thing really takes on a very ominous tone.”
Kyle Shideler, director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, told NTD that he doesn’t have credible evidence to suggest Routh acted alone.
He said that Routh’s international travels and alleged foreign contacts require serious counterintelligence review.
Shideler added that just because the suspect appeared to be pro-Ukraine that does not necessarily mean he had no contact with other governments. He might have been “recruited under a false flag, believing he may have been operating for one government, when in fact, he was operating for another.”
Routh’s ability to remain undetected for nearly 12 hours along the golf course perimeter has sparked calls for increased security measures for Trump and other political leaders.
Secret Service Acting Chief Ronald Rowe said that the Secret Service needs to move from a “reactive model” into a “readiness model.”
Shideler questioned Rowe’s statement, “The U.S. Secret Service is supposed to already be in a readiness model. They are supposed to be very aggressively investigating individuals who threaten former presidents.”
He said the suspect had reportedly published a book online calling for the Islamic Republic of Iran to assassinate the former president and indicated his own support for that.
“So this is the kind of thing that the Secret Service should have been on top of. They should have been aware of this individual that he was a threat,” he said. “If they weren’t, then that’s very concerning. ”
He said he doesn’t believe the “readiness” is a new model but rather “a return to a model that the Secret Service has traditionally used and which has traditionally worked.”
Gaub said that “intelligence gathering will always play a significant role” in such incidents. However, the challenge is to “separate true intelligence from what has increasingly become just a sheer amount of noise, and it’s hard to differentiate between the two for those who don’t work in this arena and are not trained to understand the difference.”
Don Ma contributed to this report.