Impeached homeland security czar Alejandro Mayorkas has appointed two establishment allies to conduct a 45-day “independent review” of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
The Mayorkas appointments come amid increasingly vocal Republican criticism of his agency’s failure to prevent the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service chief under Mayorkas, is facing growing calls for her resignation amid leaked reports about very inadequate security at the speech in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump was grazed by a bullet.
The lead appointment is Janet Napolitano, a Democrat-affiliated lawyer who was elected governor of Arizona in 2002. In 2008, she endorsed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for the White House, and he then appointed her as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes the Secret Service agency.
In 2012, Napolitano worked closely with Mayorkas to establish Obama’s legally invalid DACA amnesty for younger illegal aliens. In 2021, Napolitano urged the Senate to confirm Mayorkas for the DHS job.
Mayorkas also appointed Frances Townsend, who worked as a homeland adviser to President George W. Bush. She opposed Trump’s election in 2016 and signed a letter with other establishment leaders saying:
Mr. Trump’s own statements lead us to conclude that as president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world.
Mayorkas’s failure to protect Trump — and growing evidence of agency deception — threatens Mayorkas’s job.
For example, agency officials admitted this Saturday that they repeatedly denied Trump’s requests for extra security, contradicting Mayorkas’s denials on Monday after the murder attempt.
The New York Times reported in July 2021:
Mr. Mayorkas himself said on Monday that the allegation of denied requests was “a baseless and irresponsible statement and it is one that is unequivocally false.”
But on Saturday, Mr. [Anthony] Guglielmi said that the agency had indeed denied some campaign requests for Secret Service support. He said, however, that the agency regularly uses local and state law enforcement agencies to help support federal protection, and that this was the case at the Butler Farm Show grounds, where the Trump rally was held.
In his CNN interview on Sunday, [House Speaker Mike] Johnson told the host, Jake Tapper, that he had talked with Mr. Mayorkas several hours after the shooting and asked him “basic questions” about the security that was in place at the rally. “Mayorkas at that time did not even know whether drones were used for security,” Mr. Johnson said. “I mean, some very basic things.”
On Sunday, Mayorkas revealed two additional appointees.
Mark Filip served as Deputy Attorney General for George W. Bush and David B. Mitchell, the former superintendent of police in Maryland.
In his Sunday statement, Mayorkas claimed, “We are committed to getting to the bottom of what happened on July 13, and I am grateful to the distinguished members of this independent review who will bring decades of expertise in law enforcement and security operations to this important investigation.”
In February, the Hosue impeached Mayorkas for failing to enforce the nation’s border laws. In April, the Senate threw out the charges in a series of party-line votes.
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