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(LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Secret Service has questioned a recently-ousted Democrat staffer who publicly wished for a future assassin of former President Donald Trump to have better aim, days after the Republican presidential nominee narrowly survived a shooting at a campaign rally.
Trump’s event in Butler, Pennsylvania, was interrupted on Saturday by gunshots from a rooftop 130 yards away from the stage. Trump miraculously only suffered grazing to his ear, but former fire chief and father of two Corey Comperatore was killed, with fellow attendees David Dutch and James Copenhaver still in critical condition as of Monday morning. The shooter, killed by Secret Service snipers, was identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, but grave questions remain about how security failed to prevent him from taking the shot in the first place.
The Natchez Democrat reports that, the same day as the shooting, Jacqueline Marsaw wrote a number of Facebook posts making light of the attack, including “I don’t condone violence but please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time ooops that wasn’t me talking.” Marsaw, a field office manager for Democrat U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, later deleted the posts and claimed she simply “got overwhelmed in the moment.”
Thompson told Fox News the next day, “I was made aware of a post made by a staff member and she is no longer in my employment.”
Adams County Sheriff Travis Patten told the Natchez newspaper on Sunday that he was contacted by the Secret Service for help locating Marsaw.
“She came to my office but the agent requested that we go to her residence,” Patten said. “That is normal procedure, that way they can do a site visit of the home of the individual who made potential threats.”
He added that he does not believe Marsaw poses a threat: “Anybody who knows Jackie knows she is passionate about what she does and gets emotional, sometimes to the point where she makes outbursts like she had when she made the post on social media. She was very remorseful and told the agents that what she did was unwarranted and uncalled for […] Marsaw let the agent know she had reached out to the congressman and that she had resigned her position.”
In the immediate wake of the shooting, the liberal mainstream media has struggled with how to navigate criticism that their own heated rhetoric about Trump being a “racist,” “rapist,” and “fascist” who would “end democracy” might provoke extremists to violence, particularly in light of their own long history of accusing conservatives and Republicans of the same.
Earlier this year, Thompson was among nine House Democrats who voted against maintaining Secret Service protection for Trump in the event he is sent to prison and, in fact, introduced the bill to strip him of that protection. The shooting has also renewed calls to extend Secret Service protection to third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which has so far been denied.
Polling aggregations by RealClearPolitics and RaceToTheWH indicate a slim popular-vote lead for Trump in the November election and, more importantly, leads in swing states, translating to an Electoral College advantage over incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden.
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