Susan Shelley: What’s going on with the Secret Service

Donald Trump is not the first U.S. president to face two assassination attempts within a short period of time. It happened to Gerald Ford in 1975. On September 2, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the murderous Manson Family cult, tried to take a shot at Ford in Sacramento, but was stopped. Just 20 days later, Sara Jane Moore shot at him in San Francisco. She missed.

At the time, inflation was raging and the country had recently witnessed the fall of Saigon after the long and divisive Vietnam War. Ford had become president in August 1974 after Richard Nixon's resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and his pardon of Nixon a month later is probably what doomed his re-election chances. A little-known former governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, won the Democratic nomination and defeated Ford in 1976.

Then voters threw Carter out of office four years later and elected Ronald Reagan, who was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin's bullet two months after taking office.

It's not only Republicans who are targeted for assassination. Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president in November 1963 after John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, and Hubert Humphrey became the 1968 Democratic nominee following the murder of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles.

However, the fact that multiple attempts on President Trump's life are not unprecedented does not make them any less suspicious, especially given that the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security are stonewalling House and Senate investigations and public records requests.

Congress was already investigating the assassination attempt at the July 13 Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when the second attempt was made on September 15 at Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. The shooter on the mysteriously unguarded rooftop in Butler, Thomas Crooks, was shot dead, but not until bullets presumably fired from his gun killed a former fire chief attending the rally, critically injured two others, and came within an inch of murdering the former president.

"We haven't been able to interview the sniper who took out Crooks," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, told reporters. Johnson is the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Johnson said they have not received the autopsy report, or the toxicology report, or a report on the trajectory of the bullets, or any information about how the crime scene was handled. "There's just basic information we should have right now, and we don't have it," he said.

The chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Connecticut Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal, accused the Biden-Harris administration of "stonewalling," a word that rings with echoes of Watergate. The Department of Homeland Security, Blumenthal said, was "almost derelict in its duty by resisting our requests for documents, evidence and information that are necessary to investigate."

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, said this: "Since July 13, the Department and the U.S. Secret Service have provided the Senate with multiple briefings, nearly 2,500 pages of documents, and more than 50 hours of transcribed interviews. It has done so while also cooperating with investigations by the House Special Task Force, the Independent Review Panel directed by the President, the DHS [Office of Inspector General], and the Government Accountability Office."

Connoisseurs of congressional investigations will immediately recognize the familiar trick of drowning the investigators in a time-consuming slog through material that is only marginally relevant while withholding the key documents, recordings and crucial materials.

Separately, a spokesperson for the Secret Service told Fox News Digital, "The U.S. Secret Service is cooperating with a wide range of reviews and investigations related to the attempted assassination on Former President Donald Trump. This includes multiple Congressional investigations, including inquiries by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the Senate, and a special bipartisan task force in the House of Representatives."

Is this merely the familiar rattle and whine of a bureaucracy resisting accountability for its massive incompetence? Or is it something worse?

But others are stepping up to investigate the troubling events.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed an executive order that puts the Office of Statewide Prosecution in charge of the investigation into the second attempt on Trump's life. Somehow gunman Ryan Routh, 58, was able to camp outside the Trump International Golf Club for nearly 12 hours and then poke a rifle through a fence on the sixth hole as the former president was putting on the fifth. Shots were fired by the Secret Service, and Routh fled but was later arrested at a traffic stop.

Another investigation that is not under the control of the Biden-Harris administration may be resolved in a courtroom. America First Legal has filed a lawsuit against the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security for illegally withholding government documents about the first assassination attempt, in Butler. Among other things, AFL wants to see documents related to staff shortages and standards for hiring and employment in the Secret Service.

Sen. Ron Johnson told News Nation that over the last 10 years, the Secret Service budget has gone up 65% to $3.3 billion, and personnel is up 32%, from 6,200 to 8,300. "They are also, by the way, part of a department that has a $190 billion budget, 240,000 employees, who they will detail to the Secret Service in some of these surge situations," he said. "It's not resources, it's management."

Perhaps that's the main thing the Service would like to keep Secret.

Write and follow her on Twitter