CBS News
Trump returns to Butler, PA for a rally tomorrow. Here’s how the Secret Service will secure the event.
When former president Donald Trump takes the stage once again tomorrow in Butler, Pennsylvania, the security apparatus around the GOP nominee will look starkly different from the day of the first assassination attempt against him, when he took cover behind his podium as a gunman opened fire.
Secret Service and the second Butler rally
U.S. Secret Service personnel will be stationed both inside and outside of the secure perimeter. That area includes the roof of a glass company warehouse where investigators say 20-year-old Thomas Crooks fired off eight rounds on July 13, grazing Trump’s ear, killing one attendee and injuring two others.
“Since the attempted assassination of former President Trump on July 13, the U.S. Secret Service has made comprehensive changes and enhancements to our communications capabilities, resourcing, and protective operations,” U.S. Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement. “Today, the former President is receiving heightened protection and we take the responsibility to ensure his safety and security very seriously.”
Federal law enforcement and local police began planning for Trump’s return to Butler roughly two weeks ago, multiple law enforcement officials told CBS News. The first in-person planning meeting with local law enforcement took place earlier this week, on Monday.
“Regarding the October 5 event in Butler, we are coordinating closely with the Pennsylvania State Police as well as local law enforcement in and around Butler Township,” Guglielmi added. “We are also leveraging other federal security resources to expand personnel and technology.”
Those federal resources will include agents from the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations, who will stand post inside and outside the security perimeter. TSA agents will be working the magnetometers along the perimeter of the site, according to law enforcement sources.
And while the 45th president’s security footprint will include more personnel and assets – complete with counter sniper teams, enhanced counter drone technology and counter assault teams – there will also be additional Pennsylvania State Police officers on site, with tactical team members blended alongside U.S. Secret Service teams throughout the event.
Senate report on Secret Service and Trump Butler rally
Last month, an interim Senate report identified planning, communications and security failures in the U.S. Secret Service’s efforts during former President Donald Trump’s July rally that “directly contributed” to the assassination attempt against him.
The joint investigation of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations indicated that several Secret Service officials experienced chronic problems with their radios on July 13. In one notable instance, a Secret Service countersniper was offered a local radio to help with communications through the day, but he didn’t have time to pick it up because he was working on “fixing” his own Secret Service radio. Because of failures of radios on site in Butler, the special agent in charge gave away his radio to a lead advance agent and went without one for the rest of the day, the report said.
Trump’s detail now travels with a radio communications specialist from the U.S. Secret Service’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, whose primary purpose is to share real-time information with Trump’s team, as relayed on all law enforcement radio channels, according to multiple law enforcement sources.
Addressing Butler rally site vulnerabilities
A number of tall buildings lining the perimeter of the Butler Farm Show create line-of-sight vulnerabilities for Trump. The Secret Service is mitigating that threat with stage enhancements, rows of farm vehicles parked around the rally site and bulletproof glass, according to the sources.
Unlike the July 13 rally, members of the U.S. Secret Service, Pennsylvania State Police and Butler County Police will sit together in a unified command post.
Trump in Butler amid assassination threats from Iran
The two attempts on Trump’s life followed the arrest of a Pakistani national with ties to Iran, charged with allegedly plotting a murder-for-hire scheme targeting current and former U.S. officials, including Trump.
Matthew Olsen, head of the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, said in an interview with CBS News Thursday that the U.S. government has been “intensely tracking Iranian lethal plotting efforts targeting former and current U.S. government officials – and that includes the former president.”
Olsen added, “I would say that we are very concerned – gravely concerned – about Iranian plotting.”Last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence briefed Trump on “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him.”
“I think we’ve been very, very clear that that is a threat vector that we are extremely concerned about monitoring very closely, working to gain as much information and fidelity on as we possibly can,” a senior DHS official told CBS News in a reporter briefing, Wednesday. “That is a U.S. government wide effort to involve all of our partners across the United States government.”
A Homeland Threat Assessment released by the Department of Homeland Security Wednesday stated that Iran “maintains its intent to kill US government officials it deems responsible for the 2020 death of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)-Quds Force Commander and designated foreign terrorist Qassem Soleimani,” an action carried out during the Trump administration.
“It is no secret that this is a challenge we are confronting on a daily basis right now,” the DHS senior official added.
Authorities anticipate roughly 25,000-30,000 will be attending the rally Saturday.
Nikole Killion, Daniel Klaidman, Clare Hymes, Michael Kaplan contributed reporting.
Nikole Killion and
contributed to this report.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has not endorsed Donald Trump, the financial giant said Friday after the former president claimed in a social media post that the executive, America’s most prominent banking industry leader, was supporting him.
“Jamie Dimon has not endorsed anyone. He has not endorsed a candidate,” Joe Evangelisti, a spokesperson for the New York-based bank told CBS News in a statement.
The denial came after the Republican presidential nominee posted a screenshot on his Truth Social account falsely stating, “New: Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has endorsed Trump for president.”
Trump told NBC News he didn’t know about the post, which was still visible on his account as of 5:10 p.m. Eastern Time.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Seemingly coming from a verified account on X earlier in the day, the post swiftly drew attention from various pro-Trump accounts before Trump weighed in.
Before Trump won the Republican nomination for president, Dimon had expressed support for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley during the party’s primaries.
Friday’s Truth Social post is not the first in which Trump incorrectly suggested winning support by a high-profile person. The former president in August posted AI-generated images claiming that Taylor Swift was backing him. The superstar endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris a few weeks later.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a new way for Americans to look up how high or low levels of viruses like COVID-19 and flu are in their local area for 2024.
This year’s new “community snapshot” is the CDC’s latest attempt to repackage its data in one place for Americans deciding when to take extra precautions recommended in its guidelines, like masking or testing, going into the fall and winter.
It centers around a sweeping new weekly metric called “acute respiratory illness.” The metric’s debut fulfills a goal laid out by agency officials months ago, aiming to measure the risk of COVID-19 alongside other germs that spread through the air on a single scale from “minimal” to “very high.”
“The biggest thing we’re trying to do here is not just to have a dashboard. It’s not just putting a bunch of information in front of people and kind of expecting them to navigate all of that,” the CDC’s Captain Matthew Ritchey told CBS News.
Ritchey, who co-leads the team that coordinates data fed into the snapshots, said the CDC gathers experts from across the agency every Thursday to walk through the week’s data coming from hospitals and emergency rooms, wastewater sampling and testing laboratories.
“All those groups come together, talking through their different data systems and their expertise to say, ‘this is what’s catching my eye.’ And then that’s what we want to tee up for the public,” he said.
Ritchey cited early signs of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, starting to increase this season as expected in Florida, which is called out at the top of this week’s report.
Behind the CDC’s new “respiratory illness” metric
Based on emergency room data, the “acute respiratory illness” metric, grades overall infections in each state or county from “minimal” to “very high.”
That is defined broadly to capture infections from COVID-19 and influenza, as well as a range of other diseases that spread through the air like whooping cough or pneumonia.
A previous definition the agency had relied on called “influenza-like illness” had been too narrow, Ritchey said, with requirements like fever which excluded many patients.
A separate set of standalone levels is still being calculated each week for COVID-19, influenza and RSV.
The formula behind those levels is based on historical peaks and valleys in emergency room trends, which were analyzed from each state.
“We’ve looked over the last couple of years and understand the low points of the year, based on our lab testing, and at that point we say, that’s the baseline or ‘minimal’ category,” said Ritchey.
How to see what COVID variants are dominant
Not all of the CDC’s data made the cutoff to be included on the first layer of the agency’s new snapshot.
For example, while the front page for the general public does mention current SARS-CoV-2 variants like XEC, details about its prevalence remain on a separate webpage deeper into the CDC’s website.
“That whole jumble of lots of acronyms or letters and things like that just don’t overly resonate with them,” he said.
For flu, the CDC is still publishing more detailed weekly updates designed for experts, through the agency’s “FluView” reports.
Those include a weekly breakdown of the “type” – influenza A or B – and “subtype” – like H3N2 or H1N1 – that is being reported to the agency from testing laboratories.
Health authorities closely watch trends in flu subtyping as well, since they can help explain changes in the severity of the virus as well as vaccine effectiveness.
Future changes to come
The snapshot remains a work in progress as the CDC gathers feedback from the public as well as local health departments.
“We have a continuum of users, from the public health practitioner to my parents, providing feedback on how they’re using it. More often, the feedback we get is, ‘hey, I use this to help inform how I work, or talk with my elderly parents,'” he said.
One big change coming later this season is the resumption of nationwide hospitalization data, after a pandemic-era requirement for hospitals to report the figures to the federal government lapsed.
A new rule by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to start collecting the data again for COVID-19, influenza and RSV is due to take effect in November.
“As that data starts to come in again and gets to a robust enough level, the plan is that it would be incorporated on the site as well,” he said.
Another long term goal is to add information specific to other respiratory illness culprits beyond COVID-19, influenza and RSV.
“We want to be able to talk about maybe some of the other things that are not the big three as well, like mycoplasma and some of those other things too, that we know peak during certain parts of the season,” he said.
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