As investigators analyze what led 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks to try to assassinate former president Donald Trump – and how Crooks was able to fire at the former president at a heavily patrolled event on July 13, 2024, one thing is clear, according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

“A direct line of sight like that to the former president should not occur,” Mayorkas told ABC news on July 15. That same day, President Joe Biden established an independent review of the shooting.

Amy Lieberman, a politics and society editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Javed Ali, a scholar of counter-terrorism at the University of Michigan and a former FBI and Department of Homeland Security official, to better understand the security failures that this shooting exposes, as well as how this attack may be part of a larger pattern.

What stood out to you most about this shooting?

There was an obvious security failure, and you don’t need my background to know that. The main questions that these experts are going to be considering now is how did it happen, why did it happen, and how do you prevent it from happening again?

The fact that Crooks was able to literally, in broad daylight, get on the roof of a building that had a direct line of sight to the campaign stage is shocking – it wasn’t inside the security perimeter, but it was still very close. And the angle that Crooks had was a straight shot. How did Secret Service protection not consider this possibility?

They would have had........

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