No one was responsible for planning and security decisions for the July 13 campaign rally where former President Donald J. Trump was shot and killed, according to a preliminary report released Wednesday by a Senate committee that outlines a damning list of Secret Service failures.
Confusion and confusion over leadership roles during the Butler, Pennsylvania, incident led to communication breakdowns and security lapses, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found. There was confusion over who was supposed to secure the building from which the shooter opened fire. There were multiple plans in place, none of them final. Urgent warnings were detected but then abandoned.
The report paints a picture of a bungling leadership on the ground that was ignorant of potential threats to Mr. Trump’s safety, and a culture within the agency that was unwilling to take responsibility for those failures. Even after hours of testimony, the committee said, no one involved in the rally’s security plans could say who made the decision to exclude from the security perimeter a group of nearby warehouses, one of which the shooter eventually climbed and used as a perch to shoot Mr. Trump.
“Everybody is pointing the finger at somebody else,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the top Republican on the panel, told reporters Tuesday.
The committee report also describes an agency that struggled to use basic technology to do its job, with agents having faulty radios and drone detection devices that didn’t work. One agent who had only three months of training on drone equipment couldn’t get it to work and had to call a toll-free tech hotline “to begin troubleshooting the issue with the company,” which took several hours.
