Senate Committee: Secret Service failures before shooting at Trump rally “avoidable”

Similar to the agency’s internal investigation and an ongoing bipartisan investigation in the House of Representatives, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s interim report found numerous failures at nearly every level in the lead-up to the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting, including planning, communications, security and resource allocation.

“The consequences of these failures were devastating,” said Michigan Democratic Senator Gary Peters, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.

Investigators found that there was no clear chain of command between the Secret Service and other security agencies, nor a plan to monitor the building where the gunman climbed to fire the shots.

Officials were working on several separate radio channels, causing communication problems, and an inexperienced drone pilot was tied to a hotline because his equipment wasn’t working properly.

The communication between the security officers is a “multi-level game of Chinese whispers,” said Peters.

According to the report, about two minutes before gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire and fired eight shots in Trump’s direction, the Secret Service was notified of a person on the roof of the building, just 450 feet from where the former president was speaking.

Mr Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential candidate, was hit in the ear by a bullet or bullet fragments in the assassination attempt, one protester was killed and two others were wounded before the gunman was killed by a Secret Service sniper.

About 22 seconds before Crooks fired, the report said, a local official radioed that an armed person was in the building. However, that information was not passed on to key Secret Service officials interviewed by Senate investigators.

The panel also interviewed a Secret Service sniper who said they saw police officers running toward the building where the shooter was stationed with their guns drawn. However, the person said they did not think to notify anyone to get Trump off the stage.

The Senate report comes just days after the Secret Service released a five-page document summarizing the key conclusions of an ongoing Secret Service report on what went wrong, and a bipartisan House task force investigating the shooting will hold a hearing Thursday.

The House committee is also investigating a second assassination attempt on Trump earlier this month, when Secret Service agents arrested a man with a rifle hiding on the golf course at Trump’s club in Florida.

Each investigation has uncovered new details that suggest a massive security lapse in dealings with the former president. And politicians say they want to find out a lot more to prevent something like this from happening again.

“This was the result of numerous human errors by the Secret Service,” said Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the ranking Republican on the panel.

The senators recommended that the Secret Service more clearly define roles and responsibilities before taking any security action, including appointing a single person to be responsible for approving all security plans.

As investigators discovered, many of those responsible denied any responsibility for planning and safety deficiencies and rejected blame.

Vanguards interviewed by the committee said that “planning and safety decisions were made jointly and there was no specific individual responsible for approval,” the report said.

Communication with local authorities was also lacking. Two days earlier, local police had raised concerns about security measures in the building where the shooter was staying and told Secret Service agents on a tour that they did not have enough personnel to seal off the building.

Secret Service agents subsequently gave investigators conflicting information about who was responsible for these security measures, the report says.

The internal report, released by the Secret Service last week, also pointed to several communication problems, including a lack of clear instructions to local law enforcement and a failure to fix line-of-sight weaknesses at the rally site that exposed Mr. Trump to sniper fire, as well as acknowledging the “complacency” of some agents.

“This was a failure of U.S. intelligence. It is important that we hold ourselves accountable for the failures of July 13 and use the lessons learned to ensure that such a failure does not happen again,” Ronald Rowe Jr., the deputy director of intelligence, said after the report was released.

In addition to better defining responsibilities for the events, the senators recommended that the agency completely overhaul its communications processes at security events and improve information sharing. They also recommended that Congress consider whether more resources are needed.

Democrats and Republicans disagree on whether the Secret Service should be given more money after its failures.

A budget proposal due to be passed before the end of the month proposes an additional $231 million (£173 million) for the agency, but many Republicans say an internal overhaul is needed first.

“This is simply a management problem,” said Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee’s investigative committee.