Bipartisan report on Trump shooting identifies Secret Service technical problems, ‘preventable’ mistakes
WASHINGTON — The Secret Service made a series of “predictable” and “preventable” mistakes before the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July that allowed a gunman to fire shots that killed a Trump rallygoer and grazed the Republican presidential nominee’s ear, senators from both parties charge.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a joint interim report on their investigation into the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting Wednesday that accountability was unclear ahead of the July 13 rally and that personnel they interviewed who were responsible for planning it “shifted blame.”
Although the Secret Service acknowledged its “ultimate responsibility” for the failure to prevent Trump from being shot, the report said key members of the Secret Service “refused to acknowledge individual areas of planning or security responsibility as contributing to the failure to prevent the shooting that day.”
The report also highlights the types of technology problems that are common within large federal bureaucracies like the Secret Service.
Among the errors identified by the report, the Secret Service knew that local law enforcement snipers had planned to position themselves inside the building from which the shooter ultimately fired, rather than on the roof. Communications were siloed, and the Secret Service “did not ensure it could share information with its local law enforcement partners in real time,” the report said.
Another example in the report: After a local law enforcement sniper texted the head of the Secret Service counter-sniper team about the man who would soon shoot Trump, it took the Secret Service leader seven minutes to send an email relaying the information and photos. It’s unclear how long it took other members of the Secret Service sniper team to read the email — titled “Local CS BOLO,” meaning “be on guard” — and one member of the counter-sniper team said the email was “vaguely worded.”
The report also noted that other components of the Secret Service rejected requests from Trump’s team, including a request to liaise with the counter-assault team to coordinate tactical teams that day.
The Secret Service released its own internal report last week.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the investigative subcommittee, said the Secret Service engaged in “a sort of Abbott-and-Costello-style ‘Who’s on First?'” after the attack.
Blumenthal stressed that the report was preliminary and said many questions remained unanswered, adding that the Department of Homeland Security had been “less forthcoming” than the American people needed and deserved.
“If I had to point to a solution here … the chain of command would be at the top of the list,” Blumenthal said.
“I think we should be appalled and astonished by the lack of transparency on the site and the lack of information sharing,” he said. “What happened here was really a series of mistakes that created a perfect storm of staggering failures. In a sense, many of these individual failures, if corrected at the time, could have prevented this tragedy. And clearly, it was a tragedy. A man died, a former president was nearly killed, and this could have been prevented in the first place.”
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, pointed to the “interim” nature of the report as evidence that the investigation is ongoing.
“Our report was also bipartisan,” Peters told NBC News. “So we put politics aside, we just looked at the facts, and the more we get out there, the better people will have a sense of what really happened.”
Peters stressed that it was “absolutely important to get the facts out as quickly as possible, because conspiracy theories will always arise whenever there is a lack of information.”
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, a Trump supporter who has previously suggested that the Jan. 6 riot was largely a “peaceful protest” except for a few “agitators,” has also suggested, without evidence, that the government may have played a role in the shooting. He said Tuesday that the Secret Service was “obstructing” the congressional investigation.
“They’re moving slowly on this investigation. I think this committee needs to start issuing subpoenas,” said Johnson, the top Republican on the Investigations subcommittee. “It’s a management problem, it’s that simple. You can keep throwing money at it, but if you don’t solve the management problem, you’re not going to solve it.”
The report also highlighted the secret service’s bureaucracy and its difficulties in technological innovation and effective communication.
The agency used a counter-drone system at Butler to try to combat unmanned drones — like the one used in the Trump assassination attempt that day — but the advanced agent operating the device immediately had problems with it, the report said. The agent then moved the device away from satellite trucks that were at the rally but were still having problems. Even after calling an 888 tech support line operated by the manufacturer, the system was not working, the report said.
Eventually, someone in the technical support unit said the system’s components weren’t communicating, and the agent borrowed an Ethernet cable from the Trump campaign’s broadcast production staff and finally got the system working at 4:33 p.m., the report said.
The only problem, the report said, was that Trump’s alleged assassin had stopped flying his drone about a half-hour earlier, taking an 11-minute flight starting at 3:51 p.m.
