Secret Service personnel were aware that Thomas Crooks had a rifle and had climbed onto a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he had an unobstructed view of Donald Trump — but that information was never relayed to Trump’s own protective detail.
The findings were outlined in a sharply critical report released Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.
The report concluded that the Secret Service failed at several key moments to identify, stop or disrupt Crooks before his attempted assassination of Trump at the July 13, 2024, campaign rally in Butler.
“The Secret Service’s overall lack of policy and processes coupled with limited intelligence sharing and poor collaboration and communication with protectee staff and state and local law enforcement set the conditions that led to missing opportunities to prevent and detect the attempted assassination,” the inspector general’s report stated.
Investigators based their review on 92 interviews, more than 70,000 documents and a 3D reconstruction of the rally site used to map where people were positioned before, during and after the shooting.
Among the failures cited, the report said the Secret Service did not detect a drone Crooks used to survey the campaign stage. Investigators pointed to an operator who had received only about 20 minutes of informal training, as well as a faulty ethernet cable that was not repaired until roughly 30 minutes after Crooks had already flown the drone over the area without being detected.
The report also found that Trump campaign staff objected to agents parking trucks in a way that would have blocked the shooter’s line of sight, saying the vehicles would be “too close to [President Trump’s] press shot.”
Those findings were part of a broader list of security breakdowns detailed in the report, which also criticized the absence of formal communication channels with local law enforcement, limiting the flow of information about Crooks, and faulted poor communication and intelligence sharing with leadership in the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh Field Office.
Secret Service agents knew Thomas Crooks (left and right) had a rifle and had made his way onto a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania with a clear shot at Donald Trump — and never issued a word to the president’s own protective detail
Donald Trump is seen with blood on his face surrounded by Secret Service agents as he is taken off the stage at a campaign event at Butler Farm Show Inc. in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024
Crooks, 20, was shot dead after attempting to kill the now-President at a rally in 2024
Trump’s ear was shot in the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024
The lack of coordinated communications with state and local law enforcement would also prove deeply damaging.
In total, the report says, the Secret Service did not receive 102 radio transmissions sent by local law enforcement officers in a separate communications room in the run-up to the attempted assassination, and regarding what the report described as an ‘increasingly intense’ suspicious person search.
Instead, the report says, Secret Service received only five phone calls and three text messages about a suspicious person, who was later identified to be Crooks, during that period, including that the suspicious person had a range finder.
They also never received three transmissions from local law enforcement officers that the suspect in question had a long gun.
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President Donald Trump holds a meeting in the Situation Room of the White House. A newly unredacted report sheds light on the communications and security failures that left then-candidate Trump vulnerable to an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024
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‘The limited communication regarding the suspicious person … did not create a sense of urgency for Secret Service members to report this information to President Trump’s protective detail,’ the report concludes.
In total, the OIG report made seven recommendations for the Secret Service to improve its processes for securing events.
The unredacted report comes just weeks after gunshots were fired at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC, and after FBI Director Kash Patel announced a series of arrests made in connection with an alleged UFC attack plot at the White House.
Reports of the UFC investigation appeared to catch the Secret Service, which assisted the FBI in leading the investigation, off guard. It also comes as the nation’s capital, and commander-in-chief, prepare to host Americans from across the country for the nation’s 250th anniversary.
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