Less than a month after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, the agency that failed to protect him from harm may get a bigger budget.

On July 13, when Thomas Matthew Crooks shot and wounded Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Secret Service agents sprang into action, heroically shielding him from further harm and escorting him from the stage.

But subsequent reporting revealed that the incident was entirely preventable: Rally attendees alerted law enforcement to the presence of a suspicious person more than an hour before he started shooting, and they later saw him climbing on top of a building with a gun. "Trump was on stage for around 10 minutes between the moment Crooks was spotted on the roof with a gun and the moment he fired his first shot," the BBC reported.

After a particularly disastrous appearance before the House Oversight Committee, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned. Appearing before two Senate committees this week, acting Director Ronald Rowe Jr. testified that he was "ashamed" of the agency's failure.

Almost immediately after the shooting, a narrative emerged that the lapse owed to a lack of resources.

At a July 15 White House press briefing, a reporter asked Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of the Department of Homeland Security—which oversees the Secret Service—"Is the Secret Service stretched too thin?"

"The Secret Service in—in times like this calls upon other resources and capabilities to handle a—a campaign of this magnitude," Mayorkas replied. "And I do intend to speak with members of the Hill with respect to the resources that we need."

"Our agency needs to be adequately resourced in order to serve our current mission requirements and to anticipate future requirements," Cheatle noted in her opening testimony before the House Oversight Committee on July 22. "As of today, the Secret Service has just over 8,000 employees," she told Rep. Stephen Lynch (D–Mass.). "We are still striving toward a number of 9,500 employees, approximately, in order to be able to meet future and emerging needs."

In a letter to Rowe this week, Sens. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) and Katie Britt (R–Ala.)—respectively the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security—sought to understand the agency's financial needs as the subcommittee drafts an appropriations bill.

"Congress provided more than $190 million to the Secret Service in Fiscal Year 2024, specifically for protection requirements related to the 2024 presidential campaign, plus an additional $22 million above President Biden's budget request for protection-related travel costs," the senators wrote. "Despite this increase, in mid-June, prior to the attempted assassination, the Secret Service submitted a reprogramming notification to our subcommittee detailing its intent to shift $19 million to cover a shortfall for protection-related travel funding." This was in addition to the imminent addition of two vice presidential candidates and their families to the agency's protective purview, plus independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President Joe Biden added to the list after the shooting.

"As a result, the Secret Service is assuming new protection costs related to the campaign at a time when it already appears to lack sufficient resources to fulfill its protective mission," the senators continue.

But it's not at all clear that a lack of resources was the issue: The agency's budget in real numbers grew 55 percent over the last decade, to $3.62 billion, and its work force grew 33 percent from 2002 to 2019.

It is possible the agency may be stretched thin in its duties: The Secret Service is tasked by law with protecting not only the president, vice president, and their immediate families, but also former presidents, vice presidents, and their spouses for life, and their children until age 16. They also protect visiting heads of state and "other distinguished foreign visitors to the United States and official representatives of the United States performing special missions abroad when the President directs that such protection be provided."

"The Secret Service currently protects 36 individuals on a daily basis, as well as world leaders who visit the United States," Cheatle told the House Oversight Committee.

But that's not the agency's only job: Agents are tasked with investigating a number of financial crimes like counterfeiting, money laundering, and identity theft, as well as ransomware attacks, botnets, and "online sexual exploitation and abuse by predators and other criminals, sometimes for financial gain."

It's possible that the Secret Service is doing too many jobs for the amount of resources it enjoys. Perhaps many of its financial and investigative tasks should be shifted to the U.S. Treasury Department, which is where the Secret Service originated before Congress added presidential protection to its plate in 1901. The numbers demonstrate that the agency's problem is not purely financial.

But it's also worth keeping in mind that government agencies, by their nature, do too much, too poorly, and for too much money. The Secret Service, for all the nobility of its mission, is no exception.

The post Secret Service May Get Even More Money After Failing To Protect Trump appeared first on Reason.com.

I don’t know why I’m drawn to doomed litigation but there’s no denying this impulse.

I know what the plaintiff wants to achieve. That much is made clear by Justin Rodrich’s reporting on the lawsuit for the Daily Beast. But I don’t know how he (or any other pronoun! — it’s filed as “Doe”) expects this to stop a rogue state from trying to kill them, much less put $5 million in his pockets.

Nonetheless, here we are:

An FBI informant who leaked sensitive government secrets that reportedly then led to a deadly U.S. drone strike claims Iran’s fearsome security apparatus has targeted him for assassination over the perceived betrayal, forcing him underground, in an undisclosed location, following a botched kidnapping attempt.

In a heavily anonymized federal lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast, “John Doe” says Iranian agents torched his car, broke into his home, and threatened his relatives after learning he was working with the American government. He now lives “in constant fear” of being killed by Iranian agents who have carried out dozens of hits and hundreds of abductions in various countries “with impunity,” according to his complaint.

Because Doe is a marked man, he went into exile in a nearby nation where he “must now avoid any public interaction, in order to remain safe,” the complaint states.

Unlike a lot of other fatally flawed (perhaps a poor choice of words in this case) litigation I’ve covered, Doe has a legitimate beef: a foreign nation is trying to kill him on, perhaps on his own soil — soil, it must be noted, that does not belong to the nation of Iran.

As legitimate claims go, demanding to be compensated for living in constant fear of your own safety is a pretty good one.

But the beef aside, how does the plaintiff expect this to actually go? For one thing, the federal court must agree that Washington, DC is the proper venue to hear this case. It may decide that it is, but in doing so, may provide a few hints for Doe’s assassins as to their general location.

The plaintiff has also secured legal representation. If you’re a state-sponsored hacker, that’s where you’re going first if you’re trying to discover the location of a person you want to kill.

And, since Iran has allegedly already engaged in intimidation, attempted kidnapping, and other threats on the informant’s life abroad, it’s unlikely the country is going to suddenly develop a healthy respect for US civil litigation procedures and respond to this lawsuit in a timely fashion… or at all, actually.

Iran has already broken the gentlemen’s agreement over assassination in foreign countries that you’re not actually at war with. Given that, the threat of default judgment isn’t actually a threat. It’s just one more thing you can file in your “IDGAF” drawer.

Even if the Iranian government does respond to this lawsuit, one would expect the invocation of sovereign immunity. One would also hope that a US Court would refuse to rule that sovereign immunity covers extrajudicial assassinations by countries not currently engaged in declared wars on said target and said target’s nation.

One would hope. But then again, maybe it won’t!. I mean, that’s exactly the thing that’s central to the initiation of Iran’s (alleged) assassination attempts:

An FBI informant who leaked sensitive government secrets that reportedly then led to a deadly U.S. drone strike claims Iran’s fearsome security apparatus has targeted him for assassination over the perceived betrayal…

We’re not technically or legally at war with Iran. And yet! So, that kind of ruins that argument. This government is only at war with things at the moment. There’s the War on Drugs. The War on Terror. The War on Fentanyl. The War on [Political Hot Button Topic Du Jour]. But we’re not at war with Iran. Nor are we at war with Yemeni wedding parties or foreign journalists, but nonetheless we’ve killed both with extrajudicial military actions and/or drone strikes.

While that adds more legitimacy to the plaintiff’s arguments and, conversely, detracts from the imagined defenses of the Iranian government, the lawsuit [PDF] doesn’t have a chance in hell of (1) stopping Iran from trying to kill this person, and (2) resulting in a $5 million payout to cover the alleged damages suffered due to the threatened person having to shut down his businesses.

So, as tragic and awful as the plaintiff’s situation is, this lawsuit only has the potential to make things worse. All of this means nothing when you’re dealing with a government willing to violate any number of official and unofficial agreements to kill someone on foreign soil. And that appears to be something Iran’s government is especially willing to do:

All told, Doe contends, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which in recent years has declared war on, among others, a podcaster in Vancouver who discussed sex on the air and a journalist in Brooklyn who criticized the regime, has “intentionally inflicted emotional distress, induced severe mental anguish and emotional and psychological pain and suffering, and caused the need for medical treatment.”

If there’s any entity in the US with some legal culpability, it might be the FBI, which clearly hasn’t done its best to protect this informant. Then again, it might just be the informant’s limited OpSec ability, which allegedly resulted in him being “followed” by Iranian agents and photographed entering the “US facility” where he turned over information to their handlers.

This is all very awful and hopefully the publications of these allegations, as well as the resulting lawsuit, will prompt the US government to do what it can to protect its source and adjust its diplomatic relationship with the Iranian government. But suing Iran isn’t going to stop it from trying to kill people it wants dead. And it certainly isn’t going to be offering any settlements to foreign residents who have, so far, managed to avoid being assassinated.