Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It is Tuesday, the seventeenth of September.
I'm Billy, I'm Zara.
On Sunday, there appeared to be another assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump, who is also the current Republican candidate for the US election in November. It was the second time in about two months that a gunman had been in shooting distance of the former president. Now questions about how this could happen to a man who is constantly surrounded by security are intensifying. Well explain how
it unfolded in today's deep dive. But before we get there, Zara, what is making headlines today?
Murder charges against a New South Wales couple have been dropped after they were found not guilt in a high profile case. Nineteen year old Amber Haigu, who lived with an intellectual impairment, went missing in two thousand and two. She lived with Robert and Anne Geeves. The married couple were accused of killing haig to take her five month old baby after an alleged unofficial surrogacy agreement. Robert Gieves
is the child's father. The gieves were charged with Haig's murder in twenty twenty two, but have now been cleared of any wrongdoing. A new South Wales Supreme Court judge described Haig as quote vulnerable and said the couple's motive to murder her could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt.
An investigation into the conduct of one of Australia's biggest unions, the CFMEU, has found continued links to bicky gangs and criminal activity. The embattled construction union was placed into administration after nine newspapers alleged it had been infiltrated by organized crime groups. A preliminary investigation has pointed to quote a cycle of lawlessness within the union. The report said CFMEU operations were being influenced by Biki gangs and parts of
the union were vulnerable to corruption. It is recommended the CFMEU work with police to handle the alleged criminal activity.
At least eight people have drowned and at least two hundred and fifty thousand homes are without power in Central Europe due to intense flooding. A storm system called Boris brought torrential downpours to Chechia, Romania, Poland and Austria, where the body of a firefighter has been recovered. The European Union Commission chief shared her quote heartfelt solidarity with all affected by the devastating floods on x. The EU stands ready to support, she said.
And today's good news. Australian actor Elizabeth Dipicki has won an Emmy for her role as Princess Diana in the Netflix series The Crown. This is the Ossy actress's second nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, but it's her first time winning an Emmy for the role. It's also the first time an Australian actress has won an Emmy in this category. Debickie called the role of Diana a great privilege. This year, The Crown received eighteen
Emmy nominations and won three, including Debickie's win. Chogun also made history with a record eighteen Emmy wins at this year's ceremony.
Okay, so Billy, What's absolutely crazy about this is that this is the second time in a matter of months that we have dedicated a podcast to talking about an attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Completely wild It's been precedented completely and I think it raises a whole host of questions and we're going to get to those in a second. For anyone that needs to catch up on the news from yesterday, What do we know about the assassination attempt?
So this all happened at Trump's golf course that he owns in West Palm Beach in the US state of Florida. It was on Sunday in the US. It was Monday morning in Australia, and so Trump was playing golf there and like he always is, he was under the protection of the Secret Service. Now they had an agent who was one hole ahead of him whilst he was playing golf, and it was that agent ahead who spotted a gun
in the bushes. Here's what authority said about how it started to unfold in the press conference after it happened.
He was able to spot this rifle barrel, stick it out of the fence and immediately engage that individual, at which time the individual took off.
They also said that the person was only about three hundred to four hundred and fifty meters away from Trump, so very much within shooting distance. But they think that they were waiting for Trump to just get a bit closer. Now, we heard in that audio that we just played that they said the suspected tudor was immediately engaged. What we know is that that was from the Secret Service. But as you hear, the person got away in a vehicle,
so they weren't injured by those gunshots. When Secret Service got to where this man was in the bush, they found a few things.
In the bushes where this guy w Else is an eight K forty seven style rifle with a scope, two backpacks which were hung on the fist that had a ceramic tile at them, and a GoPro which he was going to take pictures of.
So I think authorities could deduce with some level of confidence what this person's intentions, at least seemed to be. Now, as the person jumped into the car to escape, there was a witness who saw him and took a photo of the car, which they were then able to send out to local police, and that worked in. Local police then pulled him over on a highway. Speaking straight after the incident, the FBI didn't formally identify the alleged shooter.
Yeah.
However, over the following hours, anonymous officials told News outlet ap that the suspect's name is Ryan Wesley Routh. No doubt we will hear more about him in the days to come and exactly what his intentions and motivations were. But what we do know is that Trump escaped the whole thing un injured and is safe.
I have so much that I want to unpack there, like the fact that the alleged shooter was able to leave and to get away and only then was pulled over is absolutely mind blowing to me. But I know that we're going to get there in a second. So just quickly, how did Trump respond? Because he came out with such a show of strength, and you know, he really spoke a lot about that first assassination attempt. What did we hear after this second one?
So quite quickly after, he sent out an email to his fundraising list. I'll read out part of it. He said, quote, I wanted you to hear this first. I am safe and well nothing will slow me down. I will never surrender. And he added, unity, peace, make America great again.
I think the question I keep seeing online, and certainly the thing that keeps coming up in my mind is how is it possible that people with guns keep getting within such close proximity a former president Trump, you know, it is just absolutely mind blowing. So that in those same conversations we often talk about the Secret Service, and here in Australia we don't have a secret service. Can you just explain a bit about the US Secret Service?
Yeah, So the Secret Service is a law enforcement agency in the US and their main mission is to protect the president and also the vice president and then also those close to them, and it also includes former presidents and their families. And so those who are former presidents receive security detail for life. So that's why Donald Trump, well that's part of the reason why he has so much security because he is a former president. And so
this extends again to all former presidents. You know, Barack Obama, for example, has security surrounding him twenty four to seven.
I think that that's one of the interesting peculiarities of this election is that we now have both the vice president and the former president.
Yeah, so both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Because of Donald Trump's position as former president and because of Kamala Harris's position as vice president, they have a lot of security surrounding them all the time. And just to give you a bit of context. In Australia, you know, we don't have officially Secret Service, but we have something similar called the Close Personal Protection and they also follow the Prime Minister everywhere they go. They also scope out locations
before the Prime Minister gets anywhere. Even Zara, when we've had Anthony Albanesi come to the daily Os, his security have come to the locations prior, look to see if there are any security risks and then once they've done that allowed the Prime Minister to come through.
So that advancing is done for any high level I mean, advancing is done for anyone in political office, but from a security sense, especially here for the Prime minister.
Yeah, and it's out of recognition that people in these positions have a higher level of threat surrounding them because of their position. Now that's in Australia. The Secret Service in the US is a lot more intense, I think for a number of reasons, one of them being that guns are obviously legal in the US, so they have to be more careful.
Yeah. So we know that both here and in the US, there is this thing that happens where a security detail scopes out and them is at an event or wherever the leader is to protect them. We've already seen one assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life. Has his security detail increased since that attempt? Because I think that's the thing I can't get over is that it happened once, but now it's happened again. Did anything give during that time?
Yeah, So just a quick reminder, on the thirteenth of July, So just over two months ago, the former president Donald Trump was injured by a gunshot while he was holding a rally in Pennsylvania. Now, the gunman was shot and
he was killed by the Secret Service at that time. Now, what we found out after that was that his security had actually just been increased in the weeks prior to that first assassination attempt because US authorities had learned of an Iranian plot to kill him, which I think just really paints a picture of the level of direct surrounding this matter. In the press conference yesterday, authorities touched on it, but they didn't provide too much more detail.
The threat level is high. We have increased the amount of assets that we've supported, so we are we live in danger times.
Yes, so few details there. One thing we do know that has changed is that he now only does outdoor campaign rallies if he is behind bulletproof glass, but saying that he really does all of them inside.
Now it's so interesting because I imagine that if you were in the Secret Service, you know, going to a rally or having these huge public you know, mass demonstrations would be a really difficult thing to have to deal with. But this second attempt was almost in private. It wasn't at one of those huge events, And so I wonder how, you know, different these two scenarios are, and how that
would impact what goes on behind closed doors. But if we're to go back to that first, I know that there was quite a bit of discourse afterwards about should the Secret Service have done more? Did they fail? Obviously it's in the name secret that we might not know a whole heat, But do we know anything about if there was a failure or if it was something that couldn't be avoided.
Yeah, investigations are still ongoing, but there has been some acknowledgment of shortcomings and there's been a direct consequence of that. So shortly after the July shooting, the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheedle, resigned and at the time, she said the Secret Service fell short of its mission quote to protect our nation's leaders, and she called it the agency's most significant operational failure in decades, and she took full responsibility for what happened.
Very strong words there, very.
Strong, and again she stepped aside because of it. In terms of what actually went wrong, Cheedle didn't really get into the specifics of that. She peered before a committee, but said she might not be able to answer every question because there were so many investigations ongoing and she didn't want to get in the way of those investigations. So, whilst those investigations haven't been made public yet, just a few days ago, the Washington Post quoted anonymous sources talking
about what the findings were. So, according to the Post quote, the investigation found that agents from Secret Service headquarters and the Pittsburgh Field Office had an alarmingly slipshot, which means
careless strategy to block a potential shooter. The Post went on to say that there were also communications breakdowns that allowed the assassination attempt to happen, things like local polices alert of a suspicious man at the rally not being broadcast widely on Secret Service radio and agents in the Secret Service radio room not being able to access real time alerts. So again, a number of different shortcomings that
have been identified. I'll also add again that this is just going on anonymous sources, so we will have to wait and see if the investigation is released publicly.
Yeah, and again I think that there's a lot that will be happening behind closed doors. You know, Donald Trump is not the only person that the Secret Service has to protect, and I imagine they wouldn't want to jeopardize the safety of anyone else, you know, if there are shortcomings or there are failings, if you were someone else who had Secret Service protection, I'm not sure how good
you'd feel reading all of these things. Speaking of other people who have Secret Service detail, does Donald Trump have less security than someone like Joe Biden, who is the sitting president currently.
Yeah, this was talked about in the press conference yesterday, the fact that because Trump is not the current sitting president, he doesn't have as much security as Biden does. So even though there could be an assessment that you know, based on what we've seen in the past two months and knowing that he probably is one of the most
polarizing figures in the world. That doesn't, based on what I could understand from the press conference, mean that he gets more security detail, or even mean that he gets the same amount of security detail as the current sitting president. Here's some of what was said at this.
Level that he is at right now. He's not the city president. If he was, we would have had this lower golf course around it. Well, because he's not, the security is limited to the areas that the Secret Service deems possible. So I would imagine that the next time becomes at a golf course, there'll probably be a little bit more people around the perimeter. But the Secret Service did exactly what they should have.
Done, So it's absolutely true that if he was the sitting president, there would have been more security surrounding him. I guess the question now is, because we know of these threats on his life, will they increase the security detail to mean that he has as much security as a current president.
Is there a push for that to happen, Like, are there people who want that to happen.
Yeah, there is a push for it to happen, but there was also a push for it to happen last time. So whether or not there will be more security is still a question that is up in the air. One thing to note is that this push is coming from both so it's coming from Republicans and Democrats. This isn't something you know. I think that so much of what we see in the US is that everything feels politicized,
and everything feels like a political attack. I think this is one of those rare cases where it doesn't feel like it's being politicized, if that makes sense. So Joe Biden released a statement yesterday saying that he has directed his team to quote ensure that Secret Service has every resource, capability and protective measure necessary to ensure the former president's continued safety. So we'll see what happens. We are less
than two months out from the election. Now it's clear they think that there is a high level of threat around Trump. I think the word unprecedented almost feels overused after the past few years that we've had for a number of different reasons, and especially when it comes to the political landscape that we are operating in. But I really think that there's no other word to describe two apparent assassination attempts in two months on a political candidate
leading up to the US election. It just is unprecedented, it really is.
And the US right now is just fascinating. I mean, it's scary, it's full of threats, and I mean there's so much at stake here, so we'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Daily Os. We are currently running a survey to understand how we can improve our podcast. The link for that is in the show notes. It should only take you about thirty seconds and we would really appreciate hearing from you what it is you like about what we do and what it is you think that could be better. Thank you so much, have a great day and we'll
be back again tomorrow. My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Arunda bunge Lung Chalcotin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily Os acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.