As the investigation into the second assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump gets underway, Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., told Newsmax that the Secret Service must rethink how it makes protection decisions and assigns resources.

Waltz, who is a member of the House's Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, told "Wake Up America" that the briefing the panel received from acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe last week on the agency's internal probe of the July 13 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, was "jaw-dropping" and "hard to wrap your mind around."

"I think there's a systemic problem that I'm pressing the Secret Service on hard, and that is they have to go to threat-based resourcing decisions," Waltz said. "Donald Trump has threats unlike any president or former president we've ever seen. He's being demonized by the left. And he has active and ongoing assassination plots from an enemy of the United States — the ayatollahs in Iran — two of which that we know of have already been intercepted.

"So, you can't take what I call a cookie-cutter approach: If you're a current president, you get this many resources; if you're a former president, you only get this many," he said. "Donald Trump isn't Jimmy Carter sitting in an old folks' home. He needs significantly more, we're assured he's getting significantly more, but clearly there was yet another breakdown down in Florida."

In Butler, Waltz said "basic coordination with local law enforcement didn't happen" and Beaver County "was never even present at a coordination meeting." On top of that, guidance on how to secure the AGR building was left "up to the locals" and there was poor communication between members of the security detail.

"People were text messaging back and forth as they saw [shooter Thomas Matthew] Crooks and his suspicious behavior, rather than an all-hands-on-deck, over the radio net, we have a problem here, we have a shooter on the roof, pull the president," he said.

When asked if the investigation has debunked any of the conspiracy theories that have emerged in the wake of the two attempts on Trump's life, Waltz said his "mind is still open" and stressed "we're digging hard as a task force."

"So far, it looks like gross incompetence in Butler," he said. "In Florida, I can tell you, having been around that golf course and been at it, the reason the Secret Service agent, my understanding, was clearing that particular tree line so aggressively to see a barrel poking through is that's where the paparazzi, the photographers, tend to go. And that is well known in that area. And the president doesn't like, obviously — and it's a security risk to have — photographers and paparazzi there. That's point one.

"Point two, I think they need to take a hard look at how predictable his movements are," Waltz said. "It's not kind of a tough guess to guess that the president may play golf on a Sunday morning and everybody knows when that motorcade is moving through very small Palm Beach. But to have a shooter hiding there for 12 hours is pretty incredible."

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