An independent, bipartisan review identified “numerous mistakes” by the US Secret Service and “specific failures and breakdowns” that enabled the assassination attempt that injured former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
The panel, made up of four former senior law enforcement and government officials, also warned of another catastrophic security lapse if the Secret Service does not immediately undertake “fundamental reform.”
“The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complicated, and static,” the panel wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who oversees the organization.
“The Secret Service as an agency requires fundamental reform to carry out its mission,” the members added. “Without that reform, the Independent Review Panel believes another Butler can and will happen again.”
The Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the review. A spokesperson previously told NBC News that it had “developed a plan for an agency-wide paradigm shift” to address known issues around staffing, training and use of technology.
“The increasing demand placed on the agency during this dynamic threat environment has resulted in our people being pushed to the limit,” said Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the Secret Service. “We recognize that this is not sustainable, and we cannot risk another mission failure.”
The panel conducted 58 multihour interviews of individuals from the Secret Service, federal, state and local law enforcement, and reviewed more than 7,000 documents, according to its report. The panel members and staff also traveled to Butler where they surveyed the site of the assassination attempt.
The group said it identified “deep flaws in the Secret Service, including some that appear to be systemic or cultural,” including a “lack of critical thinking among Secret Service personnel” and agents’ unwillingness to “speak up” regarding potential threats.
Long list of failures
The new report reflects much of what was previously reported about the Secret Service’s failures before and during the July 13 rally. No personnel from the Secret Service or any other federal, state or local law enforcement agency, for example, were specifically tasked with securing the roof of the building from which the gunman fired at Trump.
Mitigating the line of sight from the building to the stage with physical barriers if needed should have been a standard operating procedure for the Secret Service and “represents a critical security failure,” the review said.
Trump’s Secret Service detail did additional advance work prior to the rally, including a countersniper advance, specifically because the leader and assistant leader of Trump’s personal detail had been read in on intelligence “related to a long-range threat against former President Trump by a foreign actor, although not specific to the Butler rally.
The Trump campaign later said that Trump had been briefed by US intelligence officials on “real and specific threats” from Iran to assassinate him.
Thomas Matthew Crooks’ “method of attempted assassination embodied the very sort of threat which the intelligence warned against” the report concluded.
In a footnote, the report notes that “the panel has encountered some evidence that Trump Campaign staff expressed resistance regarding the placement of certain heavy equipment and/or vehicles at the site,” which could have been used to mitigate the line of sight risk.
The report said it was ultimately the responsibility of the Secret Service to ensure appropriate mitigations are in place and “escalate areas of difference between campaign staff and the service to their proper resolution.”
Two hours before the assassination attempt, Crooks was able to operate a drone at the rally site at 3:51 pm for approximately 11 minutes. His drone went undetected because the Secret Service’s system to counter drones had a technical issue and was inoperative for many hours. In the end, the system did not start working more than half an hour after Crooks used the drone.
The report also describes the failure of Secret Service or local law enforcement officials to find Crooks, despite him being first identified as suspicious more than 90 minutes before he opened fire on Trump.
Crooks was first identified by a local countersniper team member about to go off duty. He sent a text to other countersnipers warning that Crooks had snuck into a parking lot that was intended to be off limits and had been blocked off by physical barriers.
Most importantly, the leadership of Trump’s Secret Service detail was never informed of a person acting suspiciously in the crowd before the former president took the stage, or in the minutes after Crooks had positioned himself on the roof of the building and was preparing to shoot.
It was only at 6:09 pm, four minutes after Trump began to speak, that a Pennsylvania state trooper stationed with the Secret Service in the security room conveyed verbally that Crooks was the suspicious individual who had been walking the stage and was now on the roof of a building.
The Secret Service’s security room did not have a direct view of the rally stage and “did not have an operating Incident Command System for the centralized reporting and tracking of events and issues that arose.”
The panel recommended a series of reforms to be implemented by the Secret Service as soon as possible, such as overhead surveillance for outdoor events, additional training and the establishment of central communications and incident tracking hub for large events. The panel also recommended that all participating law enforcement agencies be included.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the panel did not find a lack of funding to be an underlying factor in the failures of the Secret Service. The agency’s budget almost doubled over the last decadejumping from around $1.8 billion in fiscal 2014 to more than $3 billion, according to government filings.
During the same period, agencywide staffing rose by almost 25%, with more than 8,100 personnel. They include roughly 3,200 special agents and 1,300 uniformed officers, according to the agency’s website.
The report concludes that the agency’s failures go beyond spending. “Even an unlimited budget would not, by itself, remediate many of the failures of July 13,” it said.
