Former Secret Service special agent Richard Staropoli weighs in on new details about President Donald Trump's second assassination attempt on'The Story.' The Secret Service has ushered in a series of changes to beef up its security measures in the aftermath of the July 2024 assassination attempt against President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania – including suspending six of its agents due to their response to the crisis. Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn disclosed the suspensions Wednesday in an interview with CBS News, and said the consequences ranged from 10 days to 42 days of unpaid leave. Additionally, he said the agents would return to restricted roles following the suspension, and said the agency was "laser focused on fixing the root cause of the problem." "Secret Service is totally accountable for Butler," Quinn told CBS. "Butler was an operational failure and we are focused today on ensuring that it never happens again."

On July 13, 2024, at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania, someone attempted to assassinate Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump. This attempt sparked a large-scale discussion on social media. We collected posts from X (formerly known as Twitter) one week before and after the assassination attempt and aimed to model the short-term effects of such a ``shock'' on public opinions and discussion topics. Specifically, our study addresses three key questions: first, we investigate how public sentiment toward Donald Trump shifts over time and across regions (RQ1) and examine whether the assassination attempt itself significantly affects public attitudes, independent of the existing political alignments (RQ2). Finally, we explore the major themes in online conversations before and after the crisis, illustrating how discussion topics evolved in response to this politically charged event (RQ3). By integrating large language model-based sentiment analysis, difference-in-differences modeling, and topic modeling techniques, we find that following the attempt the public response was broadly sympathetic to Trump rather than polarizing, despite baseline ideological and regional disparities.

A Pennsylvania police officer on Thursday told lawmakers that a local operator's bullet ultimately stopped failed assassination attempt shooter Thomas Crooks before the U.S. Secret Service fatally shot him. Edward Lenz's testimony came Thursday morning during a hearing before the House Trump Assassination Attempt Task Force, which has been tasked with investigating the July 13 shooting of former President Donald Trump, the first of two recent assassination attempts against him. "Across the two counter assault teams, the quick reaction force, three sniper teams and support personnel, we provided total manpower of 44 persons, exceeding the number requested by the Secret Service," Lenz, a commander with the Butler County Emergency Services Unit (ESU), said in his opening remarks. "At no point during the planning process was Butler County ESU asked to secure the AGR complex, nor the perimeter surrounding that area. At no point during the planning process was Butler ESU asked to deploy a sniper team to the roof of the AGR complex."

A preliminary report on the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Trump from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ripped into newly revealed missteps that went into the Secret Service's planning and execution of security at the event during which a spectator was killed, two others were seriously wounded and the GOP candidate was struck on the ear. Among the key failures, an agent inexperienced with drone equipment called a toll-free tech support hotline for help after a request ahead of time for additional unmanned assets was denied, according to a preliminary summary of findings made public Wednesday. According to the committee, he had just an hour of informal training with the device. "Multiple foreseeable and preventable planning and operational failures by USSS contributed to [Thomas] Crooks' ability to carry out the assassination attempt of former President Trump on July 13," the preliminary report read. "These included unclear roles and responsibilities, insufficient coordination with state and local law enforcement, the lack of effective communications, and inoperable C-UAS systems, among many others."

Now that alleged would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh is in custody, the FBI and Florida police will have their hands full unraveling his planning process and what may have motivated him. Former NYPD investigator and security expert Patrick Brosnan told Fox News Digital that investigators will need to trawl through a litany of information in the coming weeks, including "all things cellular, online shopping; phone camera images, bank records, email correspondence, recent search engine inquiries, dating app activity, identification of any possible burner phones, footage from … city streets, UPS trucks, Amazon trucks or backup cameras, and all cell tower pings within a fixed distance." Using this information, investigators will build Routh's profile to answer these questions, according to Gene Petrino, a SWAT commander with nearly three decades in law enforcement and a master's degree in security management. Ryan W. Routh, suspected of attempting to assassinate Republican presidential nominee former President Trump at his West Palm Beach golf course, stands handcuffed after his arrest during a traffic stop near Palm City, Florida, Sept. 15, 2024. Petrino said investigators will obtain warrants to scour Routh's social media and speak with his family and associates to determine whether someone else was involved in planning his assassination attempt on Sunday afternoon or anyone who may have trained him beforehand.

Former President Trump told FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo last week that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called him to apologize after Facebook wrongly mislabeled a now-viral photo of the former president. The photo showing Trump raising a fist after a July 13 assassination attempt at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, sliced his ear was initially labeled as misinformation on the social media site. "So, Mark Zuckerberg called me. First of all, he called me two times. He called me after the event and he said that was really amazing," Trump told Bartiromo in a "Mornings with Maria" interview that aired Thursday.

Meta has explained why its AI chatbot didn't want to respond to inquiries about the assassination attempt on Trump and then, in some cases, denied that the event took place. The company said it programmed Meta AI to not answer questions about an event right after it happens, because there's typically "an enormous amount of confusion, conflicting information, or outright conspiracy theories in the public domain." As for why Meta AI eventually started asserting that the attempt didn't happen "in a small number of cases," it was apparently due to hallucinations. An AI "hallucinates" when it generates false or misleading responses to questions that require factual replies due to various factors like inaccurate training data and AI models struggling to parse multiple sources of information. Meta says it has updated its AI's responses and admits that it should have done so sooner.

Fox News' Chad Pergram previews the Senate's Tuesday hearing with acting U.S. Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. and FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate as lawmakers continue investigating the security lapses at Trump's Butler rally. Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe, Jr. admitted to the Senate on Tuesday that the assassination attempt against former President Trump was "a failure of the Secret Service," and not local law enforcement. Rowe's admission was the most direct assignment of guilt by the Secret Service and investigators since the July 13 shooting. The acting director appeared before the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees on Tuesday alongside FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. Rowe detailed the failure of a drone detection system that was supposed to be online before shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks conducted his own reconnaissance the day of the rally.

'The Big Weekend Show' co-hosts discuss Vice President Kamala Harris' positions on key issues. Billionaire Elon Musk suggested that Google's omission of search functions for the assassination attempt against former President Trump may be improper. Musk took to social media to highlight that Google Search's autocomplete feature omitted results relating to the July 13 shooting. Google has denied taking any action to limit the results. "Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump." "They're getting themselves into a lot of trouble if they interfere with the election," he wrote in a follow-up post.

PITTSBURGH – Local law enforcement repeatedly offered to provide drone coverage in the sky above former President Donald Trump's July 13 campaign rally – where he survived a failed assassination attempt – but was rebuffed by the U.S. Secret Service, according to Sen. Josh Hawley, citing a new whistleblower. "According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally," Hawley, a Missouri Republican and member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. "This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the site. WHISTLEBLOWER REVEALS WHY TRUMP RALLY OFFICER ASSIGNED TO SHOOTER'S PERCH MOVED Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. FBI Director Christopher Wray, whose agency has taken a lead role in the investigation, confirmed during a congressional hearing this week that the would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, flew a drone of his own overhead before Trump took the stage.