Key events
Suspicious packages sent to election officials in at least six states on Monday
Suspicious packages were sent to election officials in at least six states on Monday, Associated Press reports, but there was no indication that any of the packages ultimately contained hazardous material.
Powder-containing packages were sent to secretaries of state and state election offices in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Tennessee, Wyoming and Oklahoma, officials in those states confirmed. The FBI and US Postal Service were investigating. It marked the second time in the past year that suspicious packages were mailed to election officials in multiple state offices.
The packages forced an evacuation in Iowa. A state office building in Topeka, Kansas, was also evacuated due to suspicious mail sent to both the secretary of state and attorney general.
Suspicious letters were sent to election offices and government buildings in at least six states last November, including the same building in Kansas that received suspicious mail Monday.
In his press conference on Monday, the acting director of the US Secret Service proposed that the agency needs a radical overhaul in order to meet the challenge of protecting presidents in the current climate.
“Coming out of Butler [where Trump was shot at in Pennsylvania], I have ordered a paradigm shift. The Secret Service’s protective methodologies work and they are sound, and we saw that yesterday. [But] we need to get out of a reactive model, and get to a readiness model,” Ronald Rowe Jr said.
The Washington Post is among those calling for tighter security around former president Donald Trump. In an editorial overnight the paper wrote:
Trump is not receiving the level of protection he did when he was president. This needs to change. Fifty days before a neck-and-neck election, after what are now two attempts on his life, Trump ought to get presidential-level coverage. Protecting Trump as he campaigns is as essential a part of ensuring political stability and continuity of government as one could imagine.
Elsewhere in its reporting, the paper says that Trump’s penchant for golf has long been a concern of the security services. It reports:
Trump aides and Secret Service agents have long worried about his possible exposure while golfing. The issue, they say, is twofold. He selects locations to golf – his own clubs – that are particularly difficult to secure. And then he follows a highly predictable routine on any given weekend.
Bill Gage, a former Secret Service agent, said the armed man probably didn’t need to do “very sophisticated surveillance”. “He just had to sit and wait for Trump to arrive,” he said. “You don’t have to do a lot of guessing to know where he is going to be, and that gives a bad guy time to prepare,” he said.
During his call on social media yesterday evening, the former president Donald Trump also had praise for the witness who led to the identification of suspected gunman Ryan Wesley Routh, who was subsequently arrested on I-95.
While promoting a new cryptocurrency business venture, Trump said:
The civilian did a phenomenal job. A woman. I mean, who would think … how many people would have the brainpower to follow him and take pictures of the back of his truck so that they end up getting, and the key was the license. So they got the license, and after they had the license, you know, there’s all sorts of technology where they can literally pinpoint where this truck is. I never knew something like that existed. And they pinpointed him on the highway.
It was quite something, but it worked out well and Secret Service did an excellent job, and they have the man behind bars, and hopefully he’s going to be there for a long time. Dangerous person, very, very dangerous person.
Donald Trump recounts events of shooting attempt
Here is how the former president Donald Trump recounted the events of the weekend while speaking on social media on Monday. He told listeners:
I was playing golf with some of my friends, it was on a Sunday morning and very peaceful, very beautiful weather, everything was beautiful, it’s a nice place to be. And all of a sudden we heard shots being fired in the air, and I guess probably four or five, and it sounded like bullets. But what do I know about that? But Secret Service knew immediately it was bullets, and they grabbed me.
Everybody just, we got into the carts, and we moved along pretty, pretty good. I was with an agent, and the agent did a fantastic job. There was no question that we were off that course. I would have loved to have sank that last putt, but we decided, let’s get out of here.
He started shooting at the barrel, started shooting in the bushes. Could only see the barrel. How good is that? Right? Could only see the barrel. Based on that, he started shooting and ran toward the target and was shooting a lot, I mean, those were the shots we heard. The other one never got a shot off.
The acting head of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr, has confirmed that the suspected gunman, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, did not fire any shots.
Trump was speaking as he launched a new cryptocurrency business, having previous derided cryptocurrencies, saying in 2021 “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam.”
Welcome and opening summary …
Welcome to our rolling coverage of US politics, as the country comes to terms with a second attempted assasination bid aimed at one of the presidential election candidates in the space of a few weeks. Here are the headlines …
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The suspect in the second apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump in as many months was charged in federal court on Monday morning with two gun-related crimes, as urgent investigations began into how he was able to get so close to the former US president
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Cellphone records showed Ryan Wesley Routh camped out near the golf course for about 12 hours, with food, before being confronted by a Secret Service agent. Ronald Rowe Jr, the US Secret Service acting director, said Routh did not fire any shots
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Trump added to the already tense atmosphere around the US election campaign by making highly inflammatory remarks, explicitly blaming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for inciting the attack and calling them “the enemy within”
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Biden told reporters on Monday that he did not yet have a full report of the Sunday incident at Trump’s Florida golf course, and was thankful Trump was “OK”. He said: “There is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country
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Florida governor Ron DeSantis said the state was launching its own investigation