Federal officials found what they have described as a “suspicious stand” near an area of Palm Beach International Airport used by Air Force One when President Trump travels to Florida, FBI Director Kash Patel said Sunday in a social media post.
The U.S. Secret Service said in a statement it found “items of interest” while sweeping the area before Mr. Trump’s arrival on Friday. The agency didn’t identify the items, but it shared a photo of what appeared to be a platform or hunting stand set up high in a tree.
“There was no impact to any movements and no individuals were present or involved at the location,” Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said.
Multiple sources told CBS News that the hunting stand was across a highway in a tree line more than 200 yards away and had apparently been there for months, based on its condition. Mr. Trump was not using that part of the airport in the past year due to construction, so it would not have had a direct line of sight to Mr. Trump and was not part of the Secret Service’s sweeps of the site
Once construction ended, Air Force One started using that area of the airport again, and the stand was discovered by the Secret Service right away in its initial sweeps, the sources said.
It was not immediately clear when construction ended.
The president flew into the Palm Beach airport on Friday and is set to head back to Washington on Sunday after spending the weekend at his Mar-A-Lago club.
The airport is located less than a mile north of Mr. Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, which was the site of an attempted assassination against the president last year. Prosecutors say Ryan Routh — who was found guilty in the assassination plot last month — pointed a rifle from the golf club’s tree line, but Secret Service agents spotted him and opened fire.
Mr. Trump survived a separate assassination attempt just two months earlier, when a bullet grazed his ear during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The security breaches drew new scrutiny to the Secret Service, which suspended several agents earlier this year.
