One Month After the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump, Rep. Ritchie Torres Introduces Two Pieces of Legislation Reforming the Secret Service

Today, Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY-15) introduced two bills, the “Focus on Protection Act” and the “AR-15 Perimeter Security Enhancement Act” on the one-month anniversary of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. These bills seek to reform the Secret Service to prevent similar mistakes from ever happening again.

The “Focus on Protection Act” would transfer the investigative jurisdiction over payment and financial systems from the United States Secret Service to the Department of the Treasury, while the “AR-15 Perimeter Security Enhancement Act” would direct the Director of the Secret Service to ensure that any security perimeter is co-extensive with the firing range of firearms likely to be used in assassination at- tempts and to secure all elevated positions within the firing range of firearms likely to be used in assassination attempts.

On these bills, Rep. Torres said:

“It’s been a month since the attempted assassination of former President Trump, and what prevented a national catastrophe was not the Secret Service — it was luck. If the former president had moved ever so slightly, or the shooter had been more precise in his targeting, the former president would’ve been murdered. The fact that we were only inches away from a national catastrophe is itself a crisis. We owe it to the American people to identify the security failures that led to the attempted assassination and then avoid repeating those failures in the future.

“Why was the security perimeter substantially smaller than the firing range of an AR-15, a common weapon that would be used in an assassination or in a mass shooting? Why were the rooftops and elevated positions within the firing range of an AR-15 not secured by the Secret Service? Those are two conspicuous failures. This legislation would require the Secret Service to establish a security perimeter that is every bit as extensive as the firing range of an AR-15 or a common weapon in an assassination. It would require the Secret Service to secure every rooftop and every elevated position in the perimeter. We have to prevent this kind of failure from repeating itself in the future.

“Then there is a larger issue that has to do with the Secret Service itself: it has too few resources and too many responsibilities. It has secondary responsibilities that distract from the core mission of protecting the president and presidential candidates. The Secret Service is responsible not only for presidential protection, but also for financial law enforcement, which is a vestige of the 19th century. It seems to me that it should be exclusively focused on presidential protection, and we need legislation that moves financial law enforcement from the Secret Service to the Treasury Department — precisely where it belongs. We should ask ourselves a simple question: do you want the Director of the Secret Service thinking about the protection of a president 100% of the time, or only 50% of the time? I prefer 100% of the time.”

The full text of both can be found here and here.