DuPage County Board member Lucy Chang Evans — a Naperville resident who worked as a U.S. Secret Service agent in the early 2000s — says her “heart is definitely with the Secret Service agents that were on duty” during Saturday’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
“This will impact them for the rest of their lives,” said Evans, who represents District 3. “It’s a difficult job. It’s a very stressful job.”
Since the shooting at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, which killed a bystander, critically wounded two others and had Trump ushered away with blood on his ear and face, questions have surfaced about how a gunman was able to get close enough to shoot and injure the former president.
A day after the attack, President Joe Biden ordered an independent security review of the attempted assassination. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on Monday said the agency will participate fully in the review and “also work with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action.”
Wednesday brought another slew of developments.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general announced an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally had been opened while U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson announced he would be setting up a task force to investigate security failures.
The Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee also Wednesday subpoenaed Cheatle to testify on Trump’s assassination attempt at a congressional hearing next week.
Evans says she thinks what happened Saturday will be a “teaching moment.”
She conceded that she did not “want to second guess what they did” at Trump’s rally, but “20/20 being hindsight, most people would say that setup was not safe.”
The gunman — identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania — was able to climb onto a roof that was an estimated 147 yards (135 meters) from where Trump was speaking Saturday. Cooks, who was shot dead by the Secret Service, was armed with an AR-style rifle.
“I don’t know what went into the decision,” said Evans, speaking to the site security plan for Trump’s rally. “I don’t know if something changed. … I don’t know if somebody decided to change things at the last minute.”
In the days before Saturday’s campaign rally, a threat on Trump’s life from Iran prompted additional security at the event.
As far as how agents acted after the sound of shots rang out, Evans said their response was very similar to training exercises she went through as an agent.
Evans was hired as a Secret Service agent shortly after 9/11 and trained in Georgia and Maryland. She was assigned to the Secret Service’s field office in Los Angeles, California.
Evans explained that because she was a new agent, she was not assigned a dedicated protection detail. Rather she covered “a lot of protectees that would come into town in Southern California,” she said. Sometimes, she’d also have to fly out to protect then-President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Evans was in the Secret Service for about a year and a half, she said.
As she watched video footage from Saturday’s rally, she was reminded of an exercise she practiced frequently as an agent called “Assault on the Protectee.”
Evans described the exercise as “basically a simulation of an attack.” Agents would work as a protection team shadowing a mock protectee when some sort of attack takes place. Agents would then have to respond appropriately. Evans said mock attacks and scenarios varied so they’d be “ready for anything.”
In their response to the attack Saturday, Evans said she thinks agents “did a brilliant job.”
“No one wants to be the agent that has something happen on their detail,” she said. “You always want to be ready for it, and you always want to hope that you are going to respond accordingly. But no one wants the day that they had on Saturday.”
Asked if she ever had to employ her Assault on the Protectee training in real-time, Evans said, “I can’t really speak to that, but many of us have been in situations that were not published.”
Beyond what is known and unknown about the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, the attack is also a testament to how “being a politician can be dangerous in these times,” Evans said.
“That’s the political climate that we’re in,” she said.
Through the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week and during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, Evans said that in the wake of the rally shooting, she hopes that amid “the finger pointing and the conspiracy theories that I see on my own social media … normal, everyday people will try to bring the level of conversation down to Earth.”
The Associated Press contributed.
