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A “cascade” of official errors allowed a gunman to shoot Donald Trump and kill a bystander at a rally in Pennsylvania last year, according to a new US Senate report released on Sunday.
“This was not a single error. It was a cascade of preventable failures that nearly cost President Trump his life,” the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee report said.
Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to sneak onto a rooftop and open fire on Donald Trump as he spoke at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on 13 July 2024. The President was wounded on the ear and Corey Comperatore, a veteran and firefighter, was killed protecting his family. Two others in the crowd were shot. Crooks was killed by Secret Service agents.
“This was not a single lapse in judgment. It was a complete breakdown of security at every level — fueled by bureaucratic indifference, a lack of clear protocols, and a shocking refusal to act on direct threats,” the committee’s Republican chairman, Senator Rand Paul, said in a statement.
In the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination, Secret Service Director Kimberley Cheatle resigned, and six agents were suspended, as the Service became a focus of criticism.
The Committee’s report states that more than six officials should have been punished, and it notes than nobody was fired.
Current Secret Service Director Sean Curran said in a statement that the agency has received the report and will continue to cooperate with the committee.
“Following the events of July 13, the Secret Service took a serious look at our operations and implemented substantive reforms to address the failures that occurred that day,” Curran said.
Yesterday, Infowars reported that Senior Secret Service officials knew about a “classified threat” to Donald Trump’s life ten days before the assassination attempt in Butler.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) discovered that classified intelligence was presented to Secret Service officials well in advance of the rally where Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to kill Donald Trump.
The agency’s “siloed practice for sharing” such information meant, however, that it was not widely shared and few knew of the credible threat to Trump’s life.
“[T]he Secret Service had no process to share classified threat information with partners when the information was not considered an imminent threat to life,” read the GAO report, released by Sen. Chuck Grassley on Saturday.
The specific nature of the threat is not disclosed in the report, which notes that “Secret Service and local law enforcement personnel central to developing site security plans for the rally were unaware of the threat.”
The report adds that if the special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office had received notice of a threat, he would have “requested additional assets, such as ballistic glass, additional drone mitigation, and a full counter sniper advance team, among other assets.”
Sen. Grassley said the Secret Service had multiple opportunities to share information about the classified threat, but failed to do so.
“One year ago, a series of bad decisions and bureaucratic handicaps led to one of the most shocking moments in political history,” the senator said in a statement.
“The Secret Service’s failure on July 13th was the culmination of years of mismanagement and came after the Biden administration denied requests for enhanced security to protect President Trump.”
“Americans should be grateful that President Trump survived that day and was ultimately reelected to restore common sense to our country,” Grassley added.
