The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a scathing report on Wednesday detailing multiple failures by the Secret Service to protect former President Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
The report said agents had multiple opportunities to prevent the shooting, which left one person dead and several injured, including Trump.
The commission found that the failures that put Trump’s life at risk were “foreseeable” and “preventable” and resulted from a breakdown in communication and coordination between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
According to the report, the Secret Service failed to define responsibility for planning and securing the rally, failed to strengthen security at the building where gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks targeted Trump, and failed to cooperate effectively with state and local law enforcement.
The report found that the Secret Service failed to provide key resources that could help with security, such as drones or surveillance interception units. Secret Service officials rejected requests for additional drone countermeasure systems.
And the report found that the agency failed to pass along intelligence about Crooks to key security personnel even after he was identified as a suspect, and that Secret Service officials knew the shooter was on the roof of a nearby building two minutes before he opened fire.
While some of the security breaches that led to the fatal shooting of Trump supporter and rally attendee Corey Comperatore have already been reported in the media, the Senate committee report provides one of the most detailed accounts to date of how Crooks was able to fire multiple shots at Trump, one of which grazed the former president’s right ear.
Committee investigators found that Secret Service agents received reports of a suspicious person with a rangefinder around the American Glass Research building adjacent to the rally about 27 minutes before the shooting. And they found that the Secret Service received reports of a person on the roof of the building two minutes before Crooks shot Trump.
The Secret Service sniper saw local law enforcement officers running toward the building with their guns drawn, but failed to alert Trump’s security team to get him off the stage. The sniper later said it “never occurred to” him to tell Trump’s security team to evacuate him.
Senate investigators said local law enforcement alerted the Secret Service two days before the incident that the proximity of the American Glass Research building posed a security threat and that there were not enough officers to secure the building. And they said Secret Service agents interviewed by the Senate committee later gave “conflicting accounts” of how to secure the building, saying it was the responsibility of local law enforcement to protect the “outer perimeter.”
Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Lowe Jr. told senators at a joint hearing of the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees that the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump was “a failure on many levels.”
But committee investigators later wrote that Secret Service supervisors “failed to acknowledge that any individual area of planning or security responsibility contributed to the failure to prevent the shooting that day.”
Committee investigators reported that several “significant requests for information” from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Secret Service “remain unfulfilled,” and that most of the documents provided by the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security were “heavily redacted.”
“These overly burdensome redactions, including communications involving individuals interviewed by the Commission, have only served to delay the Commission’s ability to conduct these interviews and conduct its investigation efficiently and effectively,” the commission said in its report.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and the committee’s ranking member, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), announced on July 15 that the committee would conduct a bipartisan investigation.
“Our committee is focused on uncovering all the facts about the security failures that allowed the attacker to threaten the life of former President Trump and commit this heinous act of violence that killed at least one member of the crowd and injured several others,” Peters said two days after the shooting.
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