Oversight Chairman James Comer blasts Secret Service over lack of drone use: 'Not up to the job’

A powerful House chairman who led the early reviews of Secret Service failures is blasting the presidential protection agency for failing to rely more heavily on drone technology to thwart assassination attempts and is warning that increasing its funding won't solve its problems.

"They don't have a money problem. They have a leadership problem," House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer told Just the News in an exclusive interview that aired Friday on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "And it's going to take more than new leadership. It's going to take a whole new culture at the Secret Service to protect whoever the President is in the future."

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the top Republican on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, agreed the Secret Service  doesn’t need more money.

“They have plenty of resources, plenty of personnel. What they have is bad management, and unfortunately, we can't get to the bottom of who's responsible for making the decisions that were such spectacular failures in terms of protecting President Trump,” Johnson said.

Comer held the first major investigative hearing into the Secret Service after the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life in Butler, Pa., Then-Director Kimberly Cheadle resigned shortly afterwards after widely testimony criticized a series of leadership failures on her part.

For nearly a decade, the Oversight Committee has also been warning about repeated Secret Service failures, issuing reports that say the constant mishaps indicate an agency in distress.

"What we learned from our hearing in the Oversight Committee with Kimberly Cheadle, the former disgraced head of the Secret Service, is we have an agency tasked with protecting the president and the presidential candidates, and they're not up to the up to the job," Comer said in a wide-ranging interview. "They're ill prepared."

One of the many revelations from Comer's initial probe was that the Secret Service did not use drone technology to surveil the Butler, Pa., grounds before Thomas Matthew Crooks fired his shots from a rooftop, wounding Trump in the ear before the shooter was killed by a Secret Service sniper.

Lawmakers fear the Service again failed to employ already-existent drone technology last Sunday as Trump golfed at his sprawling course near Mar-a-Lago in Florida, possibly allowing suspected assassin Ryan Routh to lie in wait near a fence line undetected for hours.  Routh didn't get off a shot when an agent saw his gun barrel and engaged him with suppresion fire.

Routh was arrested after fleeing and so far has been charged with two gun offenses. He has not been charged with attempting an assassination though the FBI says they are treating the incident as a possible assassination attempt. The Miami Herald reported that Routh did not enter a plea at a Monday hearing. The judge set a bond hearing for Routh on Sept. 23. An arraignment is set for Sept. 30 should Routh be charged by a grand jury indictment, at which time the defendant would enter his plea.

NBC reported that Routh's records show convictions for carrying a concealed weapon, possession of stolen property and hit-and-run. In those cases, which included misdemeanor convictions for violations such as resisting an officer and driving on a suspended license, the defendant received a suspended sentence and parole or probation.

"One question I had after the first assassination attempt, and I have it double now, is why doesn't the Secret Service employ the use of drones," Comer told Just the News. "If you have drones flying over, like just about every large farmer does, every sporting event has, why don't you have drones flying over (campaign events)?"

"And then maybe you can identify someone climbing a roof, someone that's running out on a golf course. I mean, it shouldn't be hard to determine if you employ the use of a drones, and for whatever reason the Secret Service, is it doing that," he said.

The Secret Service acknowledges it didn't conduct a full sweep of Trump's golf property on Sunday but hasn't fully addressed lawmakers' concerns about drone technology, promising a comprehensive review soon.

Bipartisan frustration is building among lawmakers about the lack of speed and transparency they are getting in the probes of two assassination attempts.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he was "angry" about the Homeland Security Department's lack of cooperation and believed the agency is "almost derelict in its duty by resisting our requests for documents, evidence and information that are necessary to investigate."

He also predicted Americans would be shocked by the magnitude of Secret Service failures uncovered already in a report due to be released next week.

Sen. Johnson said the Secret Service is likely to resist turning over all the evidence that Congress needs.

“My guess is the Secret Service and FBI will thumb their nose to the subpoenas, just like they're thumbing their nose at congressional oversight in general,” he said. “Again, these agencies have just gotten used to the fact that Congress does not impose its congressional authority over these agencies.”