The Secret Service Has Failed Americans Since the Trump Shooting

Those of us who have studied modern assassinations, including those of President John F. Kennedy and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., hoped the government had learned a lesson from its dismal public responses.

The government’s repeated failure to address what it knew quickly fed suspicions that the silence itself was evidence of a conspiracy. The federal government sealed files for decades and refused to disclose information — often to protect the reputation of agencies and their officials — which only added fuel to conspiracy theories.

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we are seeing that happen again.

Until this week there had not been a single news conference by the Secret Service or the Department of Homeland Security, no release of files that might show the preparations for securing vulnerable locations from which an assassin might strike, not even a formal news release from the officials facing criticism for unmistakable miscues caught on video by those at the rally.

Neither the public nor Congress learned much more when Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service at the time of the shooting, appeared before a congressional committee on Monday. Ms. Cheatle acknowledged that the shooting at the Trump rally ranked as the agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades. But there was outrage from both Democrats and Republicans at her repeated refusal to answer specific questions about the security failures that contributed to it.

The silence looked particularly bad given news reports, initially denied by the government, that top Secret Service officials over a two-year span rejected repeated requests for more agents and magnetometers at Mr. Trump’s large public events, as well as declined to provide extra snipers for outdoor venues.

Ms. Cheatle, who resigned on Tuesday, told Congress, “The assets that were requested for that day were given.” Still, suspicions were allowed to fester that Mr. Trump’s protection service was deliberately lax.