How the Secret Service Missed Chances to Halt a Tragedy at a Trump Rally

WASHINGTON — Disorganized communications. Security threats identified but dropped. Vague instructions. Lack of follow-through.

These lapses are emerging as key reasons the U.S. Secret Service failed to protect former President Donald Trump from an assassination attempt at a campaign rally July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, a New York Times investigation has found.

The agency’s failures at the Butler Farm Show grounds — where a gunman’s bullets grazed Trump’s ear, wounded two rally attendees and killed another — are expected to be laid bare in coming weeks in an internal assessment delivered by the Secret Service and in a report from an independent Senate investigation. But the pressures on the agency have taken on even greater urgency in light of what the FBI identified as another attempt on Trump’s life at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the chair of a Senate subcommittee investigating the security failures in Butler, said that what happened July 13 was clearly preventable. “Some of the lapses,” he said, “are so egregious as to be almost unbelievable.”

Interviews with federal, state and local officials and a review of documents provide an outline of how the planning process left vulnerabilities that allowed a 20-year-old video game enthusiast to open fire on Trump.

Perhaps the most glaring problem was the multiple levels of deficient and confused communications between the Secret Service and the local law enforcement agencies it was working with that day. The most prominent of those breakdowns involved warehouses, owned by AGR International, next to the rally site. The gunman, Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, climbed on the roof of one of them to shoot at Trump.

The Times documented in interviews a series of discussions between the Secret Service and local law enforcement officials about the warehouses, showing not only that the failure to secure them was avoidable but also that the risk was very much on the minds of the personnel charged with securing the area.

On July 12, during a six-hour walk-through, the Secret Service was still discussing ways to prevent the warehouses from being accessed by the public, including the possibility of adding a police patrol or parking farm equipment nearby.

Despite all the talk, the warehouses were left unguarded.

Inadequately securing the warehouse complex was hardly the Secret Service’s only misstep.

The agency failed to effectively communicate its security plans for the rally to its local law enforcement partners, causing confusion about basic assignments. Some officers improvised their duties.

The Secret Service did not ensure that all the agencies involved in Trump’s protection the day of the rally were represented in its command center, according to interviews with the Times, preventing the agency from learning that the would-be assassin had a gun until it was too late.

The agency declined to answer specific questions about the security planning.

Ronald L. Rowe, Jr., the agency’s acting director, last week briefed members of U.S. House and Senate committees regarding the agency’s investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump, said Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesperson. “The Secret Service will continue to fully cooperate with Congress, and conclusions from our investigation will be released to the public soon,” Guglielmi said.

The Secret Service has said it accepts full responsibility for the failures in Butler.

The agency never seized on opportunities to remedy the security gaps between the first day of planning and the early evening when Trump was wounded, even in the hours before the rally when its planning flaws should have been apparent.

“The service’s job is to make sure everything is posted properly,” said Ronald Layton, a retired member of the Secret Service who led divisions with oversight of protection and event security. “If there’s nobody there, that’s got to be called out and addressed. That’s game day operations.”

A Hectic Day

Ensuring security for the Butler rally, even in the best of circumstances, was going to be difficult.

The Secret Service is often stretched thin during presidential election years. July 13 was expected to be especially hectic. Jill Biden, the first lady, was to attend a dinner in nearby Pittsburgh at 5 p.m., the same planned starting time as Trump’s event, requiring protection from the same field office.

Former presidents, as a matter of long-standing policy, typically receive a stepped-down level of protection compared with the security packages provided for sitting presidents and their families.

“Donald Trump has, by far, the biggest protective detail of any former president in history — we are not talking about a Jimmy Carter level of protection here,” said Frank J. Boudreaux Jr., the former head of the Secret Service field office in Phoenix, referring to Carter’s largely uncontroversial post-White House life. “But formers, even Trump, are not going to get the same level of protection that a current president is going to get.”

Preparing for public events is detail-oriented and complex, but can also be rote.

The Secret Service must assess a site’s weaknesses, assign security details inside and outside an event’s secured perimeter, create transportation plans and balance staffing levels against other demands. To do all this, the agency typically seeks assistance from local law enforcement departments, along with the state police. At least 10 agencies were involved in securing the Butler Farm Show grounds for the Trump rally.

The planning started in earnest July 8, a Monday, when officials from the Secret Service and local agencies met at an emergency services building in Allegheny County, convened by Timothy Burke, the agency’s special agent in charge in Pittsburgh.

At that time, plans were still being crafted and the campaign had yet to say where Trump would stand while speaking, making it difficult to determine with any precision what lines of sight might create a security issue.

“They were still waiting for the campaign to give them the site plan and, you know, make sure everything was finalized,” said Steve Bicehouse, the director of Butler County’s emergency management agency, who was at the meeting.

After Monday’s session, however, the Secret Service did not hold another group meeting, according to officials interviewed by the Times. The local and state agencies were also never given a written comprehensive plan. That meant the various agencies lacked a final opportunity to go over the plans together and identify any unresolved security issues.

Instead, throughout the week, Secret Service agents contacted the local agencies individually or in small groups, as plans evolved. Some provided specific information about assignments; others offered little guidance.

On Tuesday, the agency’s lead advance agent, Meredith Bank, asked a local SWAT commander whether his team could supply two snipers.

Ed Lenz, the commander of that team — the Butler County Emergency Services Unit, or ESU — said in an interview that Bank did not explain what the agency wanted these snipers to do or where they should be posted.

“There was really no direction,” Lenz said.

Bank then called back to say the Secret Service would be providing countersnipers after all, Lenz said. She offered no explanation for the change, though the Times later confirmed that the additional security measures were in response to heightened concerns about Trump’s safety. It would be the first time Secret Service countersnipers were assigned to a former president, Rowe said in a news conference in August.

After the calls, Lenz wrote an email to the Butler County district attorney describing the assignment, as he interpreted it. The team’s snipers, Lenz wrote, would “provide overwatch for the rally and would work in conjunction with the Secret Service countersniper unit.”

The local snipers decided for themselves the optimal places from which to watch the crowd inside the fenced-in security zone, Lenz said. One was from the second-floor windows of one of the AGR warehouses. The snipers’ position did not afford a view of the warehouse roof from which Crooks would eventually fire his shots.

By July 11, two days before the rally, some state and local agencies recognized that the warehouses could be a problem, as the closest one was outside the security perimeter but less than 500 feet from the stage. During small group walk-throughs of the site, different local partners raised their concerns, but they said the Secret Service gave contradictory answers.

In one group, a senior Pennsylvania State Police major asked who had responsibility for the buildings. Several Secret Service agents answered that the Butler County Emergency Services Unit was on the hook for that role, Christopher Paris, the Pennsylvania State Police commissioner, testified to Congress in July.

In closed-door testimony in late August, John Marciniak, the Secret Service’s lead countersniper at the rally, confirmed to Senate staff that this was the plan — the ESU would handle it, a person familiar with the testimony said.

Lenz has vehemently disputed this characterization. He cited instances in which his team members discussed their understanding with the Secret Service, including in their own small-group discussions with Marciniak on July 11. No one ever suggested those plans should change, Lenz said.

“If they said, ‘Hey, we want you to cover the roof of the AGR building,’ we would have picked a different location, focusing on that,” Lenz said.

During the walk-through, which Lenz described as “quite disorganized,” one of the Butler team members, Drew Blasko, warned two Secret Service site agents, Myosoty Perez and Dana DuBrey, that local police could not add more patrol cars to monitor the area around the warehouse during the rally, Lenz said.

But the agents assured them that the Secret Service would cover them, Lenz said. The local officers were not satisfied and asked to have the area locked down, to keep the public away, Lenz said.

A lawyer for Perez, Larry Berger, said he could not speak to the details of that conversation, but he said the record showed otherwise. Based on plans and documents created before the event, he said, local police were specifically assigned to cover the AGR building and its roof. He could not point the Times to a document that shows this.

A lawyer for DuBrey, Mark S. Zaid, said his client did not recall speaking to Blasko or even knowing who he was.

On the day before the event, a Friday, the warehouses still remained a point of focus during the six hours the Secret Service spent at the site. The agents discussed different options for shoring up vulnerabilities around the AGR complex, including placing farm equipment to disrupt any would-be sniper’s view, according to two people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the pending investigations.

None of the other agencies interviewed by the Times said they were asked to patrol that area on the day of the rally. No farm equipment blocked a possible gunman’s view. And once the events began, and the various law enforcement officers were in place, no one was stationed around the complex of buildings to prevent access to a roof.

Even if there was a misunderstanding in the days before the event about what was expected of the Butler County ESU, the Secret Service could have made sure, on the day of the rally, that the local snipers were exactly where the agency expected them to be, said Ric L. Bradshaw, the sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, where there have been many joint protective operations because Trump lives there.

“It’s incumbent upon the Secret Service agents that are there to go back to that building and make sure it’s secure like they asked,” Bradshaw said.

Burke, Bank and DuBrey have been put on administrative duty by the Secret Service, pending the agency’s investigation.

Dueling Command Centers

The lapses July 13 also included a flawed communication plan with two separate command centers at the site: one run by the Secret Service and one run by local officials.

Rowe said during the August news conference that the existence of a second command center for local officials “was unique, as I understand it.”

However, that setup was not a last-minute surprise.

Days before the rally, at least three Secret Service agents were sent an email, obtained by the Times, that included a preliminary map showing two command centers to be used as communications hubs.

With so many agencies involved, it can make sense to have a separate command center for local police, to avoid cacophony. But this works only if each agency also has a representative — with a radio — in the Secret Service’s command post, to share information coming over the various frequencies.

In Butler, only one outside law enforcement agency, the state police, was represented inside the Secret Service’s command post.

The absence of a local police representative in the Secret Service command post contributed to a crucial communications breakdown. News that a man had been spotted on a warehouse roof made it to the Secret Service command post, but not a report that he was armed — vital information that went only to the local police command post.

Thirty seconds after the first radio message from local police warned, “He’s armed,” Crooks started firing.

Weeks later, the release of body camera footage showed that officers were shocked that Crooks was able to get onto the roof, perhaps none more so than Blasko of the Butler Township Police Department. He was one of the two Butler County ESU team members who had raised concerns to the Secret Service agents about the warehouse buildings July 11.

“I talked to the Secret Service guys and they were like, ‘Yeah, no problem. We’re gonna post guys over here,’” Blasko said right after the shooting.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .