The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner should prompt the Secret Service to reconsider whether it is wise for President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance to attend the same events, Rep. Michael McCaul told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
The Texas Republican said that "the takeaway I got was the line of succession. You had the president and the vice president at the head table, both of them together, and the speaker of the House [Rep. Mike Johnson]. Had an explosive device gone off, you would have knocked out the president, vice president, speaker. The three in line of succession."
McCaul noted that 92-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley, as the president pro tempore of the Senate, "would be the president had they all been taken out."
He emphasized: "I think the Secret Service needs to reconsider having both the president and vice president together."
McCaul, who attended the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, said "the Secret Service did an extraordinary job as did the Capitol police."
However, the congressman, a former federal counterterrorism prosecutor and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said "the only thing I would critique would be the outer perimeter."
He pointed out: "You could walk into the hotel because it's an open hotel, but you could walk in without going through a magnetometer. That's something, like, when we go to the Munich Security Conference, for instance, there's always a magnetometer outside the hotel before you go in."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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