For more on the question surrounding Saturday's attack, let's turn now to Bill Gage,

a Secret Service special agent for 12 years, including as a counter-assault team leader,

he's currently Executive Protection Director for the Safe Haven Security Group.

Bill, welcome to the News Hour. Thanks for joining us.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So the attacker in this case did not make it into the ballroom.

No one was killed, thank goodness. The White House has been saying, look, the security protocols work.

The Attorney General, acting attorney general, Todd Blanche said this was a massive security success story.

Do you see it that way? I do see it that way. Secret Service operates having sort of overlapping and concentric

rings of security, sort of an inner perimeter, you know, outer perimeter, middle

perimeter. And each of those perimeters are set up in a way that if one of them sort of fails

or is stretched, the overlapping one will sort of be able to stop an attacker. And that's what happened here.

I think the acting attorney general has talked about how the attacker like kind of breached.

I think he said some version of that sort of breach, the outer perimeter. And so that's what happened

here. He was momentarily able to get through the magnetometer checkpoint by just sure speed before the agents working that main magnetometer checkpoint were able to engage him. There also were agents stationed at the door and also on the inside of the event just inside the door. So those were additional layers of security that he would have had to go

through before sort of being able to fully carry out his attack. So it did work here. The Secret Service

protective sort of model worked here. But after each of these sort of incidents, you know, the Secret

Service studies political assassinations that happen all over the world and they use them

to sort of refine and improve their own protective model. I remember going as a young agent

through training, you know, we study these assassinations in depth. And so what's going to happen here

is the Secret Service is going to make changes to the protective model. And in fact, I think you're going to see some of those changes actually this week, probably, with the King of England visiting here. There's going to be immediate impact to his security plan. I think you're going to see those magnetometer checkpoints pushed out some, and those checkpoints being staffed by additional agents, probably tactical teams. So I think you're going to see an immediate impact.

Well, let me ask you about this because I know you've been part of the preparations for these dinners in years past.

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