2024-09-25 09:58:02
WASHINGTON (AP) — A gunman killed former President and Republican White House candidate Donald Trump ahead of a campaign event in July. Multiple Secret Service failures were “foreseeable, avoidable, and related to the consequences that led to The assassination attempt was “directly related to the events that day,” according to the results of a bipartisan Senate investigation released Wednesday.
Like the agency’s internal investigation and the ongoing House investigation, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s interim report found multiple failures at nearly every level in the lead-up to the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, including planning, communications, security and resource allocation aspects.
“The consequences of these failures are dire,” said Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich. and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.
Investigators found there was no clear chain of command between the Secret Service and other security agencies and no plan to cover the building where the shooter was located for the shooting. Officers were operating over multiple separate radio channels, resulting in communications outages, and an inexperienced drone operator was stranded on the helpline when his equipment began to have problems.
Peters noted that communication among security officials is a “multi-step game of telephone.”
The report determined that the Secret Service was notified of a person on the roof of the building before Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots less than 150 meters away from Trump. Trump was hit in the ear by a bullet or bullet fragment, one rally attendee was killed and two others were wounded before the attacker was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.
According to reports, about 22 seconds before Crooks’ shooting, a local police officer reported over the radio that someone was in the building. But that information was not passed on to Secret Service agents who were interviewed by Senate investigators.
The committee also interviewed a Secret Service sniper who said he saw agents running toward the building where the shooter was with their weapons drawn, but noted that they did not think to notify anyone to remove Trump from the scene.
The Senate report comes days after the Secret Service released a five-page document summarizing the key findings of an unfinished agency report and ahead of a Senate hearing on Thursday before a House bipartisan task force. The matter was investigated. House committees are also investigating a second assassination attempt on Trump earlier this month, when Secret Service agents arrested a man with a rifle on a golf course at a Republican Florida club.
Each investigation has uncovered new details about how badly the former president’s security was breached, and lawmakers say they want to know more as they try to prevent it from happening again.
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