An independent panel tasked with investigating the July assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has a bracing message for the Secret Service: The agency has become “bureaucratic, complacent, and static,” and those weaknesses jeopardize its mission.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas commissioned the review after a gunman fired at Trump at a July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, injuring the former president and killing a man in the crowd.
On the day of the shooting, Secret Service personnel failed to communicate effectively with their state and local law enforcement partners, the four-person panel said in a 51-page report released Thursday. And nobody told Trump’s security detail about the gunman, Thomas Crooks, despite the fact that more than 20 minutes before the shooting, law enforcement officers — including at least two people from the Secret Service — feared he posed a threat and were searching for him.
The report also said Secret Service personnel displayed “a troubling lack of critical thinking” — both before and after the shooting — about the dangers some of their protectees face.
It praised the agents on Trump’s detail for putting themselves into harm’s way after the shooter fired at the former president.
“However, bravery and selflessness alone, no matter how honorable, are insufficient to discharge the Secret Service’s no-fail protective mission,” the report added.
The panel consisted of former homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano, former acting attorney general Mark Filip, former homeland security adviser Frances Townsend and former Maryland State Police superintendent David Mitchell.
Mayorkas said the Department of Homeland Security will “fully consider” the panel’s recommendations. He also commended the acting head of the agency, Ronald Rowe, for “proactively undertaking security enhancements.”
Rowe separately said his team respected the panel’s work and would carefully examine the report. However, he added, the agency has already made significant improvements.
The report included a detailed timeline of the assassination attempt. At 4:26 p.m., a local law enforcement officer noticed that Crooks had “snuck” into the parking lot of a building called the AGR building, which was cordoned off for use by police. That officer was going off duty, and texted other officers working in the AGR building about Crooks. Over the next 90 minutes, more state and local police noticed him. Some saw that he was using a rangefinder to view the rally stage. But the Secret Service first became aware that Crooks was scoping out the stage at about 5:44 p.m. Soon after that, agents and other police began searching for Crooks.
But they didn’t get to him until 6:10 p.m., as Trump was speaking on stage. That’s when a local police officer was hoisted up onto the roof of the AGR building, where Crooks had posted up. Crooks pointed his gun at the officer, who fell to the ground. Then, over the course of 16 seconds, he fired eight shots at Trump before a Secret Service agent shot and killed him.
The panel dinged the Secret Service for the fact that nobody secured the AGR building — the roof of which had a line of sight to the rally stage — on the day of the shooting, despite intelligence about foreign assassination threats. And it said that drone detection technology used by personnel at the rally had technical problems that kept it from being deployed until 4:30 p.m. If it had worked, agents would have seen that Crooks was using his own drone to surveil the rally grounds — likely prompting them to track him down.
The report also identified significant communication problems between the agency and its state and local partners, including the fact that they communicated through a “chaotic mixture” of texts, cell phone calls, radioed conversations and emails.
But despite those communication issues, at least nine Secret Service personnel were alerted to Crooks’ suspicious behavior before he opened fire. Three of those people were told Crooks was on the roof of the building in the two minutes before the shooting.
But nobody told the agents on Trump’s detail. If they had been told, they could have held him back from going on stage until police tracked down Crooks, the report said.
The report also criticized a “do more with less” mantra that the Secret Service embraced, as well as a lack of critical thinking. The agency took a formulaic approach to deciding how much security its protectees need, rather than looking individually at the threats they face, the panel concluded.
