(CNSNews.com) - Former FBI Assistant Director Danny Coleman warned Monday that the best way to have a secure inauguration for President-elect Joe Biden would be to hold it inside a football stadium, because officials can control access and keep drones away.
“Frankly, if it were up to me, I would not have this inauguration outside. I'd do it in a football stadium. We know how to secure football stadiums. We can control access. We can control everything from drones to people, and they need to do that. Right now what we need to have is a very strong presence, but also there's certain techniques that should be done,” Coleman said in an interview with Fox News’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on Monday.
“They should have extraction teams in the crowds ready to pounce on anybody that tries to instigate a riot. They need to have arrest teams. They need to have a strong physical presence. They need to monitor drones. Drones are a huge issue for me at a lot of my events, and they need to put a cone around that place so you can't fly a drone in there,” he said.
“There's about a million things that we can talk about. Let the Secret Service run it. Let the FBI help them. Keep staffers out and let's have a safe event,” Coleman added.
He said he hopes the Biden administration will put the Secret Service in charge of everything related to the inauguration.
“The FBI will support them, but these are bad times. They had professionals running it. They don't need to be worried about optics like they were with the Capitol, and they need to let the law enforcement people do their job. I hope they turn them loose, and I hope they stop the violence that’s going to occur there,” Coleman said.
According to the Associated Press, the Capitol Police did not bolster staffing and made no preparations for the possibility that the protest might escalate into a violent riot. The same number of officers were on hand during the riot as there would be on a normal day.
Host Martha MacCallum called it “unnerving” to read the reports of the requests from the head of the Capitol Police officer’s son asking the House and the Senate, saying that they were getting more concerned as it got closer to the Save America March on Jan. 6 and that they requested back-up but were told that to have the National Guard on the steps of the Capitol would be an optic problem.
“Yes. That's typical. That’s very typical of security people. We're constantly dealing with non-professional people worried about optics. If you remember, Reagan was shot because the security plan was changed by his staff members who changed it and moved the demonstrators and the media close to the scene and caused him to get shot,” Coleman said.
“That was an optic issue. We can't have that here. We don't have time for political correctness. Staffers need to plan on tea and cookies and menus and let the professional Secret Service set things up and do it the right way,” he said.