A new Senate report on the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer has revealed “multiple, unacceptable failures” in the U.S. Secret Service’s planning and response, and called for more severe disciplinary action.
Trump, then a presidential candidate, was grazed by a bullet during the rally as 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks fired eight shots. One attendee, Corey Comperatore, was killed, and two others were injured.
A sniper subsequently killed the gunman, but the attack prompted questions about how Crooks was able to avoid detection by the country’s top protective agency for nearly 45 minutes.
“What happened was inexcusable and the consequences imposed for the failures so far do not reflect the severity of the situation,” stated the report released Sunday by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
Last December, a House task force investigating the incident made nearly a dozen recommendations for the Secret Service in a 180-page report that determined the shooting was “preventable.”
The latest report details a series of breakdowns that reveal “a disturbing pattern of communication failure and negligence that culminated in a preventable tragedy.”
It said the USSS became aware of a suspicious individual “nearly 45 minutes before shots were fired, and failed to act.”
Despite advance knowledge of line-of-sight vulnerabilities at the venue, officials did not address them, the report said, adding the agency assigned an inexperienced operator to oversee counter-unmanned aerial systems and that USSS headquarters “denied or left-unfulfilled at least 10 requests” by the Donald Trump Division for additional resources, including countersniper personnel.
Last July, six Secret Service employees were suspended without pay, an agency official told NBC News last week. The suspensions ranged from 10 to 42 days without pay. It is unclear when the agents were formally suspended.
Less than two weeks after the incident, Kimberly Cheatle stepped down as director of the Secret Service amid bipartisan calls for her resignation. At the time, she said she took “full responsibility for the security lapse.”
But the report also criticized the agency for “insufficient accountability” following the attack.
“Not a single person has been fired,” it said. “The Committee believes more than six individuals should have received disciplinary action as a result of their action (or inaction) on July 13, 2024. Those who were disciplined received penalties far too weak to match the severity of the failures.”
Investigators also found that the Secret Service “denied or left unfulfilled” multiple requests for additional staff, assets and resources to protect Trump.
“This was not a single error. It was a cascade of preventable failures that nearly cost President Trump his life,” it said. “The American people deserve better.”
On Saturday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a separate Government Accountability Office report saying the USSS “failed to implement security measures that could have prevented the assassination attempt.”
“Prior to the July 13 rally, senior-level Secret Service officials became aware of a threat to then-former President Trump,” the GAO report said. “This information was not specific to the July 13 rally or gunman. Nonetheless, due to the Secret Service’s siloed practice for sharing classified threat information, Secret Service and local law enforcement personnel central to developing site security plans for the rally were unaware of the threat.”
In an interview with ABC News before she resigned, Cheatle said there was a “short period” of time between when the gunman was initially flagged as suspicious and when he began shooting.
December’s House investigation praised the response of the Secret Service to the second assassination attempt on Trump in September in West Palm Beach, Florida, crediting it for demonstrating “how properly executed protective measures can foil an attempted assassination.”
