Members of the Secret Service should be hired based on their quality and not due to a desire for diversity among the agents, Rep. Russell Fry told Newsmax on Tuesday in speaking of the failures in protecting Donald Trump during the assassination attempt on the former president.
The South Carolina Republican, who is a member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, told "Newsline" that "I think people should be hired based on their quality and not because we have to have some pre-ordained metric."
He emphasized that when "you think about the Secret Service and what they do, the services that they are supposed to perform, they are supposed to be the pinnacle of law enforcement in our country."
So it makes no sense "if we have pre-ordained numbers," Fry emphasized, saying that "then it doesn't really matter about quality, and that is a concern that I have going into this hearing on Monday [looking into the Secret Service's handling of the attempted assassination]. And that is a concern a lot of my colleagues have as well."
He added that "there are going to be a ton of postmortems on this, on what failures happened, and we [the House Oversight and Accountability Committee] are going to be right in the middle of it. We have to be, because this cannot happen, you can't have presidential candidates going around the country susceptible to these type of attacks."
Fry, who is also a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said he is excited about Trump's pick of Ohio GOP Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate.
Fry pointed out that Vance "understands working families, because he has lived it. He could have been a statistic like a lot of other kids and he's not. He rose up and he made something of himself, so I am excited about it, and I am excited by the tone it sets that we care about the working class."
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Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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