Secret Service missed 'multiple opportunities' to prevent Trump assassination attempt: watchdog
The Secret Service missed 102 radio transmissions about Thomas Crooks on the roof with a long gun before shots were fired at the Butler rally, according to a watchdog report.
The U.S. Secret Service "missed multiple opportunities" to prevent or disrupt the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump as he spoke to supporters during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General said in a report released Thursday.
The 64-page document detailed several lapses in security that allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks to get a line of sight to Trump as he stood on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, during the July 13, 2024, event.
"The Secret Service’s overall lack of policy and processes coupled with limited intelligence sharing and poor collaboration and communication with protectee staff and state and local law enforcement set the conditions that led to missing opportunities to prevent and detect the attempted assassination," the report states.
Among the OIG's findings were a failure to warn Trump's protective detail that Crooks had a range finder, a long gun, and had climbed onto the roof of a nearby building due to a lack of communication between the Secret Service and local law enforcement.
Instead, they operated out of separate locations 257 yards apart with intermittent and highly limited radio connectivity between them.
As a result, the Secret Service missed 102 radio transmissions regarding an increasingly intense search for a suspicious individual, including alerts that the suspect was on the roof with a long gun.
Because the Secret Service communications room only received a handful of phone calls and texts, agents failed to recognize the urgency of the threat and never warned Trump's protective detail to delay the speech or remove him from the stage, the OIG said.
"Communications was a problem because of inoperability. There were too many command posts," Paul Eckloff, a former Secret Service agent, told Fox News Digital. "The biggest failure that is probably not addressed in the OIG report is that they never should have accepted the risk of doing it at this site. It never should have been done. That roof had an egregious line of site."
Crooks was able to fire eight shots. Trump was grazed in the ear, but Corey Comperatore, 50, who was attending the rally, was killed. Two other spectators were critically injured but survived.
Moments after Trump was shot, Secret Service agents rushed the stage and moved him to safety.
In addition to a lack of communication, the Secret Service failed to detect Crooks' drone flight that he used to view the campaign event stage less than three hours before the rally due to an under-trained operator and an equipment malfunction, the report states.
Crooks flew the drone undetected for almost nine minutes and flew 471 yards from the event stage at an altitude of 102 feet. During the rally, the Secret Service had a counter-drone system on-site, but it malfunctioned.
The counter-drone system was not operational when Crooks flew his drone hours before he tried to kill Trump.
The agency also failed to share intelligence about a long-distance threat to Trump with the Pittsburgh field office and agents on site, the report said.
Agents also failed to secure the area outside the security perimeter and did not use available resources to block Crooks' line of sight from the roof of the American Glass Research International building to Trump, despite the line of sight being identified as a concern, the OIG said.
Despite identifying the AGR complex as a line-of-sight vulnerability during advanced walkthroughs, the Secret Service failed to ensure the view to the stage was obstructed.
"There should have been a better advance, more officers, more agents, but there's simply a limit to that," Eckloff said.
Officials originally proposed using trucks already onsite to block the view from the AGR complex, but Trump's campaign staff rejected the idea because it would interfere with press photographs.
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An agent proposed a secondary location for the trucks, but never verified that the campaign staff actually moved the equipment. As a result, Crooks had an unobstructed view of Trump's podium from a distance of just 155 yards, the report said.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the Secret Service and the White House.
The report offered several recommendations to improve the Secret Service’s processes for securing events, such as mandatory threat communication, enhanced counter-drone training, and a process to formally document the identification and blocking of line-of-sight vulnerabilities.