CNN
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Secret Service agents failed to take charge of decision-making for security at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally where former President Donald Trump was shot in July, a bipartisan Senate committee revealed in a new report Wednesday, leading to key lapses in preparation and communication that day.
The report, citing interviews with top Secret Service officials and local law enforcement who oversaw the security for the rally, said the failures were “foreseeable, preventable” and found that many of the problems identified by the committee “remain unaddressed” by the Secret Service.
Some of the problems highlighted include the Secret Service failing to set up visual barriers around the rally that may have blocked shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks’ view of Trump, the lack of a plan on how to secure the building the shooter took aim from and the general chaos of communication around the shooter’s movement leading up to the attempt on the former president’s life.
Key resource requests were also denied, and some were not even made, the report says.
Secret Service advance agents did not request a surveillance team, which could have helped patrol the rally for approximately 15,000 attendees. First lady Jill Biden, meanwhile, had one assigned to her event roughly an hour away for approximately 410 individuals.
“Overall, the lack of an effective chain of command, which came across clearly when we conducted interviews,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who is leading the subcommittee’s investigation, told reporters Tuesday. “It was almost like an Abbott and Costello farce, with ‘who’s on first?’ finger pointing by all of the different actors.”
Nobody was in charge and there was no decision-making process
In interviews with the committee, the report says the Secret Service team in charge of planning for the Butler “could not answer questions about who – specifically – was responsible” for deciding the inner and outer perimeter of the rally, and who excluded the group of buildings Crooks ultimately climbed up from the Secret Service’s perimeter.
Those involved in security planning could also not agree on who – whether agents from the Pittsburgh field office, the office of protective operations or Trump’s own Secret Service detail – was ultimately responsible for decision-making or how the process even worked.
Secret Service, federal, state and local law enforcement only had two “official” meetings ahead of the July 13 rally and described the interactions prior to the event as “informal,” the report states.
The decisions that fell through the cracks included whether to position rental trucks around the rally to obstruct any line of sight to Trump.
Other issues included how responsibilities that day were not clearly defined or understood in how communication would work that day, both between local law enforcement and the agency as well as in the agency itself.
According to the report, agents interviewed “did not agree about who was responsible for ensuring” the agency’s communication center that day “was functioning as intended.”
Agents also disagreed in interviews over who was responsible for the setup of the operations room, how it was staffed and how the agency would communicate with local officers on the ground.
The lack of clarity and subsequent finger-pointing also extended to who was responsible for securing the building Crooks ultimately fired from.
Excerpts of testimony from Secret Service agents and Butler officials outline how there was no clear entity agency to oversee securing the building, which became a huge issue when the rally turned into an emergency.
While Secret Service agents told the committee they believed Butler emergency officials were covering the building, those local officials told lawmakers they had informed the USSS they did not have the ability to do so.
A police officer with the Butler County Emergency Services Unit told lawmakers that two days before Trump’s rally, he told the Secret Service site agent that his team “did not have the manpower to lock down this area.”
That police officer said the site agent “copied” and “they would take care of it.”
But the Secret Service site agent told a different story, saying they thought the Butler County Emergency Services Unit “would have coverage” of the building.
Video shows moment police saw would-be Trump assassin just before shooting began
Because of this breakdown in communication without a clear leader in charge, the Secret Service did not go into the building as part of their advance planning or sweep the building prior to the start of the rally.
The lead advance agent for the Secret Service could not even answer the committee when asked who secured the building.
“There’s no specific. There were several different plans in place, different pieces of the puzzle from the advance that all had their own stake in making sure that that building was not accessible,” the agent said.
Credible intelligence about an Iranian assassination plot targeting Trump prompted US Secret Service officials to take the unprecedented step of deploying a counter sniper unit to help secure the Butler rally, a decision that “potentially saved lives” but ultimately failed to stop the shooter before he managed to fire multiple rounds at Trump, the report says.
Information about that threat was not relayed to senior officials in the Pittsburgh field office or other Secret Service personnel on the ground who subsequently told the committee it was something they “absolutely” should have been made aware of prior to the event so they could request additional resources that may have helped prevent the shooting from taking place.
While the FBI has said there is no evidence linking Iran to the shooter at Trump’s July 13 rally, current and former Secret Service officials have told CNN that knowledge of the credible threat prior to the assassination attempt, on its own, should have automatically led to increased security around the former president – particularly for large, outdoor events like the one in Butler.
But the apparent breakdown in intelligence sharing prior to the Butler rally raises new questions about why certain security assets were not ultimately provided by the Secret Service despite the fact that certain agents, including members of Trump’s protective detail, were aware of a credible threat.
The Secret Service site agent for the Butler rally was among those who only learned about the Iranian threat after the fact, according to an excerpt of their interview contained in the Senate report.
“As a Site Agent or Lead [Advance] Agent assigned, you should have any intelligence or any information pertaining to an active threat to a particular protectee, absolutely, in case that we need to take, you know, take additional measures, or maybe plan for additional assets or additional resources for that particular matter… So it shocked me,” they said.
Handwritten notes taken after the assassination attempt by another Secret Service agent involved in the planning echoed that view and questioned the decision-making by the few who were aware of the threat and believed sending a counter sniper unit, rather than the “entire package” of security assets available, was sufficient.
“Why am I hearing that there were threats to the site on TV… how can the SAIC of our [field office] not know about any threats,” one Secret Service agent wrote after the assassination attempt, according to handwritten notes obtained by the Senate panel.
“Why did they feel that only one part of [Special Operations Divisions] was sufficient to cover it instead of the entire package,” the agent added, referring to the counter sniper unit.
That package includes additional resources that were not provided for Trump’s July 13 rally, including counter surveillance teams, which multiple witnesses told the committee could have helped stop the shooter before he was able to fire multiple rounds at the former president.
The lead USSS advance agent told the committee she was not aware of any discussions to request counter surveillance teams for Trump, stating, “It’s not a typical asset for an advance for a former president that I had worked at that time.”
Meanwhile, the first lady regularly receives counter surveillance teams, including at her event on July 13.
Trump’s Secret Service security detail requested Counter Assault Team liaisons ahead of the July 13 rally but were denied. The liaison would provide specialized tactical advice to other Secret Service agents and law enforcement on the ground.
The lead advance agent also told the committee she requested 13 magnetometers from Secret Service, but only received 10.
Even though protective glass was not requested for the rally, or used in general for Trump events, the Secret Service site agent told the committee it “definitely would be beneficial to have protective glass.”
Radio issues and a failure to warn
The breakdown in communication and failure to establish a clear chain of command in the lead up to and during the rally made identifying the shooter and intervening exceedingly difficult.
Perhaps most telling, according to the report, was the sniper team that ultimately shot and killed Crooks failed to pick up local radio alerts about a potential shooter and watched local police approach him with their pistols drawn without initially raising any alarms.
Instead of hearing local radio chatter of warnings that a man was on the roof of nearby buildings, the Secret Service sniper team that ultimately shot and killed Crooks was only made aware that local officers were looking at something at their “three o’clock” two minutes before Crooks opened fire.
The sniper team leader told the committee that when they saw police running with guns drawn and citizens fleeing the area around the cluster of buildings, they knew something serious was happening.
“When we looked, just plain eyes, no optics or anything, you could see police running towards the building with their hands on their pistols,” the team leader told the committee. “I think one actually had a pistol facing towards the ground, out of a holster. That’s a pretty big deal for us, so immediately we turned and faced our guns towards the threat area. We didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed pretty serious, especially with the locals’ response.”
According to the report, several Secret Service agents had issues with their radios that day and told the committee that those issues were common. One of the members of the counter sniper team said he did not have enough time to pick up a local radio offered that day because he was busy fixing the issues with his own agency-issued radio.
Three minutes before Crooks fired at Trump, warnings went out over local radios that a man, Crooks, was on the roof.
In announcing the report, Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, told reporters that significant changes needed to be made in Secret Service’s leadership, adding that more money wouldn’t fix “human errors.”
“Whoever was in charge of security on the day of Butler, whoever’s in charge of security during the recent assassination tab, those people can’t be in charge,” Paul said. “There’s so many human errors. No amount of money that you give to Secret Service is going to alleviate the human errors, if you leave the same humans in charge who made these terrible, dramatic mistakes with regard to security.”
Blumenthal echoed calls for change in the top brass at the agency, which has already seen the resignation of Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service’s director at the time of the July rally, following bipartisan blowback for failing to provide any substantive answers about what happened during a hearing on Capitol Hill.
“There needs to be a house cleaning in procedure, practices and personnel,” he said Tuesday.
“I’m really hoping there’ll be fundamental, far-reaching reform in the way that the Secret Service conducts protective activities, devoting more resources, but most important, more competence in management of the allocation of those resources,” Blumenthal added. “The American people are going to be appalled and astonished by what’s in this report, the accumulation of gross incompetence that puts the president in danger and could result in continuing insecurity.”