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Cameraman got there quick.

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wtf secret service... a vehicle hits the motorcade and you let the president stand around outside in the rain nearby not unass a potential ambush zone...?

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Lotta Dems getting rammed this weekend.

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Lotta Dems getting rammed this weekend.

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Not a great photo of the USSS on the POTUS.  How about turn away from the incident and focus on the job.  Everybody wants to rubber neck.  

I'm guessing another great job of agents using a black SUV at night for a road closure.  David

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Why all the comedy???

This appears to be a serious breech of protection.  Why???

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wtf secret service... a vehicle hits the motorcade and you let the president stand around outside in the rain nearby not unass a potential ambush zone...?

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wtf secret service... a vehicle hits the motorcade and you let the president stand around outside in the rain nearby not unass a potential ambush zone...?

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Are you two going to get a room to fuck, or are we going to have to watch? If so, which senator do ya'll work for?

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Car missed?

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Prayers sent!!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3O6Nnd9CXk

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Compare and contrast how quickly they shoved Hillary in her limo when she "passed out" vs how they treated Dopey Joe.

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Moments before the crash, the driver could be heard yelling "This is MAGA country!"

Decades later, presidential car crash just a memory for Meriden man

March 21, 2008

Two cars collide at a downtown Hartford intersection; everybody is slightly shaken up, one passenger's hand is injured, but otherwise nobody is hurt.

Sounds like the run-of-the-mill mishap that happens several times a day, right? The crumpled cars are moved out of the way, a police officer writes a perfunctory report, insurance cards get swapped back and forth, and that's about the end of it.

Normally that would be true. But not on Oct. 14, 1975. Not when the crash involves the president's motorcade.

When precisely such a crash took place on Talcott Street that night, it briefly made James Salamites of Meriden a semi-celebrity. He ended up on the front pages of newspapers across the country, on various TV talk shows, and even as a contestant on the "What's My Line" game show.

"Really, it was just a traffic accident. That was all. That's how I've always looked at it," Salamites says 32 years later.

For days after the crash, photographers gathered outside the Meriden home where Salamites lived with his family, and requests for interviews came in at a furious pace, he says.

"It was crazy," he says.

Moments later, he acknowledges that the spotlight in those pre-paparazzi days was far less intense. "I can't imagine what it would be like if that happened today with all the media frenzy there is now, it would be worse," he says.

Salamites, then 19, was driving several young friends in his mother's 1968 Buick LeSabre when a Lincoln Continental limousine shot through a red light at Talcott and Market streets. Salamites couldn't stop in time, and broadsided the limo. What he saw next will be with him forever, he says.

"I looked at the other car, and looking at me is President Ford. I recognized him right away I just couldn't believe it," Salamites recalls.

Salamites' car had just rammed the presidential limousine, and for the first few minutes the scene turned very tense.

Salamites has read all the accounts of Secret Service agents with guns drawn, but says he remembers none of that. Instead, his memory is focused on Gerald Ford, staring at him through the windows of the limo and the badly damaged Buick.

Ford had been riding from a Hartford event to Bradley International Airport, accompanied by GOP state Chairman Frederick Biebel and U.S. Rep. Stewart McKinney.

"After the crash, the driver's side window of his car and the president's window were close they were almost eye to eye. I saw the expression on that young man's face when he saw who he'd hit he had this astonished look," Biebel recalled recently.

Biebel vividly remembers the Secret Service responding to an initial fear that the crash was an assassination attempt.

"Stewart, the president and I all ended up on the floor when the cars crashed. We got up and tried to get out of the car the Secret Service was standing outside both doors, preventing us from getting out," Biebel said. "They had their hands over the top of the car with their guns drawn. They were sure it was an attempt on his life."

Federal agents and Hartford police took Salamites and his friends away for extensive questioning, and the Secret Service hurriedly got the limousine moving again. Its speed was limited because a front fender had been mashed against a wheel, but it made it to Bradley airport.

Biebel's hand was broken when it slammed against the limo's partition between the front and back seats. He recalls it was sore on the drive to Bradley; he accompanied Ford on the flight to Washington, and the president's doctor wrapped it in ice.

Salamites was freed after a few hours, and Hartford police concluded that he wasn't to blame at all. Police motorcyclists leading the presidential motorcade had blocked off other streets, but missed the Market Street intersection. So when Salamites drove through the intersection, he had a green light and no reason to suspect that the president's limousine was rushing toward him along Talcott.

Biebel describes Salamites as "a part of history," but fame from the crash was brief.

Salamites and the battered Buick were billed as attractions at a 1976 car show in Hartford, and he encountered dozens of autograph-seekers. Time magazine published a lengthy story about him and the crash, and "What's My Line" invited him to Manhattan to be a contestant.

None of it was very lucrative, and it all died down after a few months, he says.

"With 'What's My Line,' I had to pay my own bus fare there and back. There were some little prizes, but no money. And I had to come home the same night," he says.

Salamites, now 51, is a good sport about discussing it all decades later. When Ford died in December 2006, Colin McEnroe interviewed Salamites on his radio show.

"Ford was a good president, I liked him," Salamites says.

Salamites prefers to talk about what has been important in his life: successfully raising his family. Salamites has worked as a machinist and tool-and-die maker during the decades since the crash. He and his wife, Nancy, own a home on a quiet Meriden street, and live with their children, Bryan, 20, and Jamie, 23.

"They've heard about the accident, but it's not something I say a lot about," he says.

In the 32 years since then, Salamites hasn't had even a fender-bender.

"No accidents and I don't want to have any," he says.

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Heres good video

That Secret Service convoy is quite large

\uD83D\uDEA8#BREAKING: Clearer footage of the Presidential motorcade incident shows the moment when Joe Biden was walking out of his campaign headquarters and about 9 seconds into the footage, you can hear the crash as a car collides with his motorcade. The driver of the car is reportedly… pic.twitter.com/LZnPoBkTtM

R A W S A L E R T S  (@rawsalerts) December 18, 2023

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Determine the threat first...... it is a crash. They aren't going to tackle him and throw him into a car for every crash. They happen quite often.

CAT was sitting there and on the possible threat.

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When they're "protecting" you but not really PROTECTING you.

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You have to be aware to be stunned

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Moments before the crash, the driver could be heard yelling "This is MAGA country!"

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What in the fuck is he holding in his right hand, a tv remote?

Eta - two cell phones, judging from pic two.

One must be his burner he ‘doesnt have’

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I'd hate to be that guy's insurance company right now.

"You hit WHAT?!!??"

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What security protocol says take POTUS out of his armored vehicle and have him stand on the sidewalk like a doofus?