Six Secret Service agents have been suspended over failures during President Donald Trump’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last year.
The then-presidential candidate was holding a rally in Butler on July 13, 2024, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire.
One shot narrowly missed Trump and grazed his ear, while a firefighter who attended the rally, Corey Comperatore, was shot dead.
Countersnipers in the Secret Service were then quick to kill the shooter at the scene.
Following the incident, the Secret Service faced significant scrutiny over how the individual managed to approach the candidate, as he had previously been seen in the vicinity. This led to Director Kimberly Cheatle stepping down from her position.
The internal consequences extended further, as six agents were informed in recent months of their impending suspensions due to their actions on that day, ABC News reports.
The suspended agents included both supervisors and frontline personnel, and they retained the option to contest their suspensions. The suspension durations ranged from 10 to 42 days without pay or benefits, according to CBS News.
‘We are laser focused on fixing the root cause of the problem,’ Matt Quinn, the Secret Service deputy director told CBS.
Six Secret Service agents have reportedly been suspended due to their failures at then presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last year
In the aftermath, the Secret Service was hounded with questions about how it let the shooter get that close to the candidate
‘We aren’t going to fire our way out of this,’ he added. ‘We’re going to focus on the root cause and fix the deficiencies that put us in that situation.
‘Secret Service is totally accountable for Butler,’ Quinn acknowledged. ‘Butler was an operational failure and we are focused today on ensuring that it never happens again.’
All of the agents have now been suspended according to federally-mandated procedures, Quinn said.
He also noted that the Secret Service has introduced a new fleet of military-grade drones and set up new mobile command posts that allow agents to communicate over radio directly with local law enforcement – which was widely seen as one of the major issues with the Secret Service’s response to the shooting.
Witnesses have explained that having multiple command stations during the July event led to confusion and a scattered response.
A damning 180-page report released by a House of Representatives task force in December even concluded that the shooting was ‘preventable and should not have happened.’
It noted that Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe testified that the agency had been operating under the assumption that local law enforcement was going to secure the AGR complex, from where Crooks fired off eight shots.
The report also included a firsthand account from a Butler cop who spotted Crooks and yelled out that he has a gun – though there is no evidence to suggest the message reached the Secret Service security detail surrounding Trump before Crooks began firing.
Secret Service agents surrounding Trump were quick to get him to the ground
Snipers quickly took out the shooter, who was identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks
It concluded that federal, state and local law enforcement officers ‘could have engaged Thomas Matthew Crooks at several pivotal moments’ as his behavior became increasingly suspicious.’
A separate Senate inquiry also found that nobody was put in charge of planning and security decisions for the campaign rally, and a Secret Service internal investigation found that complacency had set in amongst some of the agents in charge of securing the presidential candidate.
Still, questions about the shooting remain nearly one year later, even though President Donald Trump teased the release of an FBI report on the shooting and a second assassination attempt at his golf course in southern Florida.
One of the main questions surrounding the Secret Service’s response to the Butler shooting is why agents allowed the presidential candidate to take the stage when they were already discussing Crooks’ suspicious behavior.
Local law enforcement and security personnel identified Crooks as a ‘threat’ a full ten minutes before the president stepped out, Congressman Mike Kelly, who chaired the House task force, told DailyMail.com.
The Secret Service had also reportedly been warned that there was a ‘character of suspicion’ in the area more than an hour before.
A motive for the shooting has never been established, with only limited information being released about Crooks (pictured)
A motive for the shooting has also never been established, with only limited information being released about Crooks.
He was a registered Republican, but in January 2021, he made a $15 donation to a political action committee that raises money for Democrats.
In the days leading up to the Butler rally, Crooks made at least 60 Google searches with queries about the geography of Butler, but also about when and where the Democratic and Republican summer conventions would be held.
He also googled: ‘How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?’ referring to Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot and killed then-President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
