FIRST ON FOX: A group of House Republicans is accusing the U.S. Secret Service of a potential “pattern of negligence” amid continued fallout over the attempted assassination of former President Trump.

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., is leading a letter to acting USSS Director Ronald Rowe raising alarms about a recent report suggesting the agency could be facing some negative revelations in a forthcoming Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General report about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

“It is unfathomable that an assassin was able to gain access to and fire shots at President Trump from an unsecure building with a direct line of sight to the rally stage. It is equally unfathomable that public reporting suggests that U.S. Secret Service had identified the building as a potential vulnerability and failed to include that vulnerability within the security perimeter or otherwise ensure the security of the roof,” the lawmakers wrote of the July 13 shooting at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

TRUMP SHOOTING: TIMELINE OF ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW GUNMAN EVADED SECURITY

The letter then pivoted to a Politico report, stating, “Public reporting indicates that the Secret Service is in possession of a draft report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) focused on Secret Service’s preparation for and response to events on January 6, 2021.”

“The story specifically states that the release of the report ‘could cast light on a series of embarrassing security lapses for the agency,’” the letter said.

“Congress, and the American people, deserve to understand whether the security lapses at the July 13, 2024, rally are part of a larger pattern of negligence on the part of the Secret Service.”

TRUMP ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT: TEXTS REVEAL OFFICERS WERE AWARE OF THOMAS CROOKS 90 MINUTES BEFORE SHOOTING

Former President Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents after shots were fired at a campaign rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Republicans are asking Rowe for a summary of the DHS watchdog report’s findings and recommendations for the Secret Service, and how those steps were carried out ahead of the Trump rally shooting, by July 31.

The letter is also signed by Reps. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., and Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo.

The Secret Service has been under a mountain of scrutiny in the wake of the shooting, which saw a 20-year-old gunman kill one rally attendee and critically injure two others. Trump himself was shot in the ear and rushed offstage by security agents.

TRUMP RALLY SHOOTING VICTIMS’ FAMILIES BREAK SILENCE, THANK COMMUNITY FOR ‘OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT’

The pushback led to the resignation of former Director Kimberly Cheatle last week after a heated House Oversight Committee hearing.

Rowe testified in an equally high-pressure scenario before the Senate on Tuesday, where he told lawmakers on the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees that the rally shooting was a “failure” of his agency.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Secret Service for comment.

Vice President Harris, in the week since she launched a new bid for the presidency following President Biden’s departure from the race, is now backing away from several far-left stances she once promoted. 

To garner attention during her primary run for president years ago, Harris catered to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. She discontinued that campaign in December 2019, and just months later, in the summer of 2020, aligned more with the new radical ideals pushed by Democrats following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter anti-police protests and riots that rocked the U.S. afterward. 

In resurfaced clips that began airing in ads by Republican David McCormick’s campaign for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Harris is seen on camera opposing fracking, stating she would “think about” abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), describing hiring more police officers as “wrongheaded thinking” and weighing the proposal of permitting felons to vote. Harris is also seen saying she was in favor of a “mandatory buyback program” for guns and said private health insurance should be eliminated, according to a summary of the ads’ content by the New York Times. 

On fracking, which is particularly important to the economy in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state during the 2024 race, the Harris campaign reversed course on Friday. An official with Harris’ re-election campaign told The Hill that she will not seek to ban fracking if she is elected president. 

That contrasts with what Harris told CNN while campaigning for the 2020 presidential nomination. 

“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris said at the time.

HARRIS CLAIMS BIDEN FIT TO CONTINUE IN OFFICE, DESPITE MORE THAN 80 DOCUMENTED ENCOUNTERS IN PAST YEAR

Former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump told rallygoers in Minnesota on Saturday how Harris had opposed fracking.

“Oh, that’s going to do well in Pennsylvania, isn’t it?” Trump said. 

“Remember, Pennsylvania, I said it. She wants no fracking. She’s on tape. The beautiful thing about modern technology is when you say something, you’re screwed if it’s bad.”

A Harris campaign official told the Times that Harris staffers plan to paint Republicans who drudge up Harris’ past statements espousing left-wing ideas as exaggerated claims or lies about Harris’ record. The campaign also plans to paint Harris as a candidate with deep ties to law enforcement by highlighting her record as a local prosecutor and state attorney general in California, according to the newspaper. 

Harris speaks at the American Federation of Teachers’ 88th National Convention on July 25, 2024 in Houston, Texas.  (Montinique Monroe/Getty Images)

NORTH CAROLINA GOVERNOR ROY COOPER WITHDRAWS FROM CONSIDERATION TO BE KAMALA HARRIS’ RUNNING MATE

At a November 2018 confirmation hearing, then-Sen. Harris asked Ronald Vitiello, Trump’s nominee to lead ICE, if he was “aware of the perception” of parallels between ICE and the KKK.

Harris campaign officials, meanwhile, told the Times this week that she now supports the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement, is no longer in opposition to a single-payer health insurance program and supports Biden’s call to ban assault weapons – but is now against any requirement for private gun owners to sell those weapons to the federal government. 

Regarding health insurance, that means Harris is no longer promoting Medicare-for-All. 

“Kamala Harris spent 20 years as a tough-as-nails prosecutor who sent violent criminals to prison,” Brian Fallon, a Harris campaign spokesman, told the Times. “Her years spent in law enforcement and her record in the Biden-Harris administration defy Trump’s attempts to define her through lies.”

Harris speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at West Allis Central High School on July 23, 2024 in West Allis, Wisconsin.  (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

The Trump campaign on Monday highlighted how Harris said in 2019 that she was “open to conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. But the Harris campaign released a statement this week endorsing Biden’s Supreme Court reform proposal for term limits and ethics guidelines for justices. That proposal does not include adding additional justices to the nation’s highest court.  

Regarding video of Harris espousing far-left views, “the archive is deep,” Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker working with McCormick and other campaigns, told the Times. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”

During Donald Trump’s first term as president we witnessed his administration’s efforts to curtail domestic environmental regulations and the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. But few people appreciate just how much worse and deeper the damage to environmentalist goals is likely to run should he win a second term.

The Trump administration was very friendly to oil and gas business interests, unleashing a regulatory rollback of long-standing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction and consumption. In addition to scrubbing all references to climate change from the White House and Environmental Protection Agency websites, it reversed an Obama-era ban on new oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and elsewhere. Trump also revoked safety regulations adopted after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. (Both these efforts were later stopped or slowed in the courts.)

The first Trump administration also halted rules limiting air and water pollution. His EPA overturned bans on various pesticides, even when the agency’s own research demonstrated their harmfulness. Curtailment of air quality regulations between 2016 and 2018 resulted in a 5.5% increase in fine particulate air pollution, reversing the 25% decline that had taken place under Obama.

As bad as all this was for the environment, in a second Trump term the changes won’t just be related to policy. Trump’s loyalists will aim for wholesale institutional destruction of environmental regulatory capacity, not just suspending Biden-era funding for green infrastructure.

In other words, the goal won’t be to just change a policy here or there, but to fundamentally cripple the ability of environmental regulatory agencies to perform their designated functions to such an extent that if a later administration wished to impose stricter standards, officials would find it impossible to do so. The recent ruling by the Supreme Court overturning Chevron U.S.A. vs. Natural Resources Defense Council, which invalidated judicial deference to agency regulatory decisions, will only make this easier.

A series of tabletop scenario simulations run in May and June by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy research center based at New York University, made it clear that a second Trump administration is likely to aim at root and branch destruction of agency power in a variety of respects. The first step will be to revivify “Schedule F,” an executive order from October 2020 that removed protections for civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president, and use it to reclassify tens of thousands of such workers as political appointments. Then the administration will fire them and replace them with anti-regulator or industry cronies. Agencies’ legal offices and inspectors general, whose role is to prevent the implementation of unlawful orders and to root out corruption, will likely be among the first targets. The result will be systematic evisceration of the expertise, institutional memory and guardrails against malfeasance within these agencies.

In addition to going after employees at environmental agencies, the Trump administration will also seek to suspend research that provides evidence in support of environmental regulation, such as greenhouse gas emission monitoring conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which in addition to providing weather forecasts is one of the main climate change research entities within the federal government. If Trump cannot convince Congress to defund certain agencies, he may order them moved to remote corners of the country to push its employees to quit. Destroying the agencies will ensure that if Trump is ever replaced by a more environmentally friendly president, the new administration will be unable to reimpose sensible environmental regulation because the administrative capacity to do so will no longer exist.

The courts, now packed with Trump appointees, are unlikely to protect against such efforts as they did during his first term, when the judges were still mainly Obama and Clinton appointees. Litigation is anticipated to be very limited in its capacity to do more than slow down a second Trump administration, which is likely to be far more focused and strategic than the first one. (As one person in the Brennan Center simulations put it: “This time they’re going to know where the door handles are.”)

Finally, a second Trump administration will almost certainly pull back from international efforts that are essential to biodiversity preservation, greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, oceanic plastic abatement and space junk prevention. Even Trump’s ambition to set up trade barriers to protect American industrialists from foreign competition is likely to be destructive, because it will slow the global rollout of new technologies capable of addressing environmental concerns, such as solar panels and electric vehicles, if they happen to be produced in China or elsewhere overseas.

For Trump’s “America First” supporters that might sound like a feature rather than a bug. But four years of institutional vandalism would end American leadership on the world stage. The credibility built up since World War I would vanish as the world’s largest economy ignores the world’s largest problems.

Nils Gilman is the executive vice president of the Berggruen Institute.