Report on Trump shooting blasts Secret Service for ‘troubling lack of critical thinking’

An independent panel tasked with investigating the July assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has a bracing message for the Secret Service: The agency has become “bureaucratic, complacent, and static,” and those weaknesses jeopardize its mission.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas commissioned the review after a gunman fired at Trump at a July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, injuring the former president and killing a man in the crowd.

On the day of the shooting, Secret Service personnel failed to communicate effectively with their state and local law enforcement partners, the four-person panel said in a 51-page report released Thursday. And nobody told Trump’s security detail about the gunman, Thomas Crooks, despite the fact that more than 20 minutes before the shooting, law enforcement officers — including at least two people from the Secret Service — feared he posed a threat and were searching for him.

The report also said Secret Service personnel displayed “a troubling lack of critical thinking” — both before and after the shooting — about the dangers some of their protectees face.

It praised the agents on Trump’s detail for putting themselves into harm’s way after the shooter fired at the former president.

“However, bravery and selflessness alone, no matter how honorable, are insufficient to discharge the Secret Service’s no-fail protective mission,” the report added.

The panel consisted of former homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano, former acting attorney general Mark Filip, former homeland security adviser Frances Townsend and former Maryland State Police superintendent David Mitchell.

Mayorkas said the Department of Homeland Security will “fully consider” the panel’s recommendations. He also commended the acting head of the agency, Ronald Rowe, for “proactively undertaking security enhancements.”

The report included a detailed timeline of the assassination attempt. At 4:26 p.m., a local law enforcement officer noticed that Crooks had “snuck” into the parking lot of a building called the AGR building, which was cordoned off for use by police. That officer was going off duty, and texted other officers working in the AGR building about Crooks. Over the next 90 minutes, more state and local police noticed him. Some saw that he was using a rangefinder to view the rally stage. But the Secret Service first became aware that Crooks was scoping out the stage at about 5:44 p.m. Soon after that, agents and other police began searching for Crooks.

But they didn’t get to him until 6:10 p.m., as Trump was speaking on stage. That’s when a local police officer was hoisted up onto the roof of the AGR building, where Crooks had posted up. Crooks pointed his gun at the officer, who fell to the ground. Then, over the course of 16 seconds, he fired eight shots at Trump before a Secret Service agent shot and killed him.

The panel dinged the Secret Service for the fact that nobody secured the AGR building — the roof of which had a line of sight to the rally stage — on the day of the shooting, despite intelligence about foreign assassination threats. And it said that drone detection technology used by personnel at the rally had technical problems that kept it from being deployed until 4:30 p.m. If it had worked, agents would have seen that Crooks was using his own drone to surveil the rally grounds — likely prompting them to track him down.

The report also identified significant communication problems between the agency and its state and local partners, including the fact that they communicated through a “chaotic mixture” of texts, cell phone calls, radioed conversations and emails.

But despite those communication issues, at least nine Secret Service personnel were alerted to Crooks’ suspicious behavior before he opened fire. Three of those people were told Crooks was on the roof of the building in the two minutes before the shooting.

But nobody told the agents on Trump’s detail. If they had been told, they could have held him back from going on stage until police tracked down Crooks, the report said.

The report also criticized a “do more with less” mantra that the Secret Service embraced, as well as a lack of critical thinking. The agency took a formulaic approach to deciding how much security its protectees need, rather than looking individually at the threats they face, the panel concluded.

Former Secret Service director Kim Cheatle resigned amid bipartisan criticism 10 days after the shooting. But many Secret Service personnel involved in the July 13 rally “appear to have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions, or opportunities for improvement,” the report said. Instead, multiple senior agency personnel who worked to secure the rally demonstrated “a lack of ownership” regarding the security of the site.

Two months after the Butler shooting, another man waited with a semiautomatic rifle near Trump’s golf course in Florida and was not spotted until Trump was nearby. That man, Ryan Routh, is in custody and has been charged with attempted assassination.

The golf course incident was outside the scope of the panel’s review, but the panel said the fact that there was a second attempt on Trump’s life amplified the need for the agency to enact its recommendations.

The report noted that boosting the agency’s budget — even making it unlimited — would not have been enough by itself to prevent the Butler shooting. Instead, the panel urged the agency to improve its communication with state and local partners, augment agents’ training on a host of issues, and focus on experience when deciding who runs site security.

More broadly, the panel suggested that the agency should narrow its mission to protection, and should consider minimizing or even eliminating its other law enforcement work (including investigating financial crimes, currently one of its major missions). The panel also said the Secret Service needs new leaders from outside the agency.

The report also said the Pennsylvania rally goer who was killed by a stray bullet, Corey Comperatore, was the first person in Secret Service history to be killed in a Secret Service perimeter by someone trying to assassinate a protectee.

The panel conducted 58 interviews and received multiple briefings from the FBI, Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security.