Former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe said Monday the U.S. Secret Service needs to rethink its methods of protection for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
In an interview with CNN, McCabe lauded Secret Service agents for disrupting a would-be assassination attempt on Trump at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday. But the bigger issue is how Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly was able to reach that point in the first place. And how long he was able to linger undetected.
"There's got to be some rethinking of the, sort of, methodology, as they refer to it, that they are using to protect this president under these circumstances," McCabe said.
"The fact that they didn't know that person was there, and that they were there for as long as they were, raises some real concerns about how they're thinking about protecting the perimeter at edge of security, which sometimes can come very close to the principal you're trying to protect," McCabe added.
Secret Service agents spotted Routh on Sunday with a scoped AK-47 rifle near the 6th hole of the golf course in Palm Beach County, roughly 300-500 yards from Trump, police said.
Routh reportedly had set up a GoPro camera on a fence and fashioned a makeshift sniper's nest in the property's hedges as he waited for Trump to make his way down the fairway and come within range. Routh fled the scene after the Secret Service opened fire and was arrested a short time later.
"The advance agents found the threat, they eliminated the threat, and they got the president out of danger," McCabe said.
"The problem is, the system they had in place was insufficient to identify an attacker with a rifle hiding out, probably, I don't know, 20 yards from the tee box for the seventh hole."