The Senate’s first public report on the first assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump revealed stunning security lapses at the highest levels of the Secret Service.
The preliminary 94-page report, part of a joint investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, was released Wednesday morning.
“Every single one of these actions is directly related to a failure in the U.S. Secret Service’s planning, communications, intelligence sharing, and law enforcement coordination efforts,” Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-MI) told reporters Tuesday just before the report was made public. “Every single one of those failures was preventable, and the consequences of those failures were dire.”
Trump survived a bullet wound, and one supporter died during an assassination attempt at a July 13 rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
Here are the Washington Examiner’s top takeaways from the first public report to be released since the fateful rally.
Secret Service had ‘credible intelligence’ of a threat before the rally
Although FBI officials claimed that Crooks was not known to the agency before the assassination attempt, the report stated that the Secret Service’s move to send countersnipers to the July 13 rally was in response to “credible intelligence” of a threat. The Pennsylvania rally was the first time a Secret Service countersniper team was assigned to a protectee other than the president, vice president, or a presidential candidate who had been formally nominated by his or her party.
Trump was not yet the Republican presidential nominee at the time of the rally, making the agency’s move notable.
However, the vast majority of the Secret Service detail, even the highest-ranking officials were not made aware of the threat.
“Only two of the USSS personnel the Committee has interviewed were made aware that there was a credible threat related to former President Trump prior to July 13, only one of whom was made aware of the classified information underlying the threat,” the report reads.
Local law enforcement warned Secret Service it didn’t have enough manpower to secure the rally
Two days before the fateful rally, the Butler County Emergency Services Unit conducted a walkthrough of the American Glass Research building, the location where gunman Thomas Crooks later accessed the roof to take shots at Trump. After determining the Pennsylvania State Police didn’t have the manpower to secure the facility, Butler County ESU officials relayed their concerns to Secret Service personnel.
“At that point, our response was the Butler County ESU would have coverage of the AGR building,” a Secret Service site agent told the committee.
Secret Service and local law enforcement officials contradicted each other in the report, with Butler County ESU officials saying they told the Secret Service they did not have the resources to lock down the AGR building and top personnel from the federal agency saying they never heard about the concerns.
Gunman’s status was allegedly not relayed to top Secret Service personnel
Many Secret Service personnel learned of Crooks’s threat to Trump 27 minutes before he opened fire on Trump. But at least three of the agents in charge of the security detail allegedly did not learn of his status until after shots were fired.
“The USSS Lead Advance Agent, Site Agent, and Site Counterpart all told the Committee they did not receive this information and therefore did not know local law enforcement had identified a suspicious person with a rangefinder – and that those local officers later lost track of this individual,” according to the report.
In the end, the committee found that there were “no post-standers or patrol assigned to cover the AGR building or roof.”
Technical difficulties with vital Secret Service equipment are common
The nation’s top security agency routinely encounters technical failures with critical equipment, according to the report. The report indicates that the problem derailed the Secret Service’s ability to transmit information and prevent the assassination attempt on July 13.
The special agent in charge did not have a working radio on him during his “entire time at the July 13 rally, according to the report. That was because he gave his radio to the lead advance agent because his own radio was not working.
The SAIC “did not ‘hold a post or a sector,’” according to the report. “… He did claim that he was there to ‘act more in a liaison capacity.’ However, he did not have any means to communicate on the radio with his USSS counterparts.”
Meanwhile, the Secret Service also encountered problems with its Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems capabilities on the day of the rally. When Crooks used his drone 200 yards from the site and used a rangefinder capable of gauging the distance to Trump less than an hour before he started speaking, the agency was unable to investigate the security breach because its C-UAS system was down.
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Although the agent in charge of overseeing the C-UAS system tried to fix it, he had “only three months of experience working with that equipment and lacked knowledge about it,” according to the report.
The agent said he had requested additional C-UAS equipment days before the rally but that his nine requests were denied.