Communication failures with local police hampered the actions of the US Secret Service before the assassination attempt on the former president Donald Trump in July, revealed a new report published this Friday.
The report lays out a litany of missed opportunities to stop the gunman who opened fire from an unsecured rooftop.
A five-page document summarizing the Secret Service report’s key findings finds fault with both local and federal law enforcement, and lays bare the wide-ranging, serial failures that preceded the July 13 shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump was shot in the ear.
While the botched response has been well documented in congressional testimony, media investigations and other public statements, the report marks the USSS’s most formal attempt to catalog the day’s mistakes and comes amid renewed scrutiny following the arrest Sunday in Florida of a man who authorities say was intent on assassinating Trump.
“It is important that we take responsibility for the failures of July 13 and use the lessons learned to ensure that another failed mission like this one never happens again,” Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. said in a statement accompanying the report’s release.
The document details a series of “communication failures” before Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, fired shots at Trump from the rooftop of a building less than 450 feet away and was subsequently shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.
It also makes clear that the Secret Service knew even before the attack that the location of the rally posed a security problem.
Among the problems identified was that some local police officers on site were unaware that there were two communications centers on the premises, meaning that officers were unaware that the Secret Service was not receiving their radio transmissions.
Police also communicated crucial information outside of Secret Service radio frequencies. As agents searched for Crooks before the bombing, details were transmitted “via mobile/cellular devices in a phased or piecemeal fashion” rather than through the Secret Service’s own network.
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