Shortly after the FBI announced Sept. 15 that former President Donald Trump was the target of a second assassination attempt at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, posted about the incident on social media.
“It’s a relief law enforcement agents on the ground in West Palm Beach prevented anyone from harming former President Trump or those with him today,” she wrote. “Political violence of any kind against anyone for any reason is unacceptable, and what happened must be independently investigated.”
Republican Joe Kent of Yacolt, who is running to unseat Perez in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, wrote on social media that the incident was “incredibly suspicious.”
“How do armed individuals keep getting within range of President Trump? At what point does incompetence become malice?” he wrote, adding that Trump needs nongovernment security experts to audit and oversee his Secret Service detail.
Kent argued the officers who identified the gunman before he took a shot “did a great job,” but that the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security failed as an organization.
“Trump’s golf course is home court, not some rally spot the (U.S. Secret Service) hadn’t secured before,” he wrote. “They knew & controlled the terrain but failed at basic perimeter security.”
Kent is a regular critic of the FBI and the Secret Service. He is a Green Beret veteran and a former CIA officer who also served as a foreign affairs adviser in the Trump administration.
During a virtual town hall hosted by the Conservative Ladies of Washington in July, Kent suggested that Secret Service agents may have been “in on” the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump.
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say it seems like there’s some degree of a plot to kill President Trump that was noticed by people in the Secret Service, and they either let it happen or some of them were in on it,” he said. “There’s no other way to look at it until they prove us wrong. And maybe they will. Maybe that’s what the investigation will get to the bottom of. It just needs to be investigated.”
Perez co-sponsored legislation to create a bipartisan task force to investigate the July 13 shooting.
In a statement from July, she argued that Kent “wants to turn a tragedy” into a “political opportunity.”
“To him, anything in the news is one big conspiracy theory, with the deep state pulling the strings,” she said.
