A new Senate committee report on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, described the events as a “cascade of preventable failures” and called for more severe disciplinary action to be taken with the Secret Service in the future.
In the 31-page, highly critical findings released on Sunday, the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee lamented the mishandling of communications around the rally and said Trump was denied extra security on the day.
“A 20-year-old gunman was able to evade detection by the country’s top protective agency for nearly 45 minutes,” the committee stated, adding that “not a single person has been fired”.
The publication of the report comes exactly a year after the attempted assassination of Trump, when he was wounded after a bullet grazed his ear on 13 July 2024. One rally-goer, Corey Comperatore, was killed before the shooter, a 20-year-old nursing-home worker from Pennsylvania named Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by a Secret Service agent. Crooks scaled a building overlooking the rally and opened fire using an AR015-style rifle.
The image of Trump defiantly raising his fist in the immediate aftermath of the attack became a political touchstone, helping push Joe Biden out of the race and fuelling support around his presidency in a heightened, accelerated manner.
The committee behind this latest report, chaired by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, conducted 17 interviews with members of the Secret Service and reviewed thousands of legal documents before it reached its conclusion. While it offers no new information on Crooks’s motives, which are still ambiguous almost a year on, it does shine light on the supposed disorganization and disarray of the security agency as the assassination unfolded.
The investigators found that the Secret Service “denied or left unfulfilled” multiple requests for additional staff and assets, and despite acknowledgements of vulnerabilities at the venue, assigned an inexperienced operator to oversee operations.
“What happened was inexcusable,” the committee stated, adding that “the consequences imposed for the failures so far do not reflect the severity of the situation.”
Six Secret Service agents have since been suspended without pay after the events last July. Their suspensions range from 10 to 42 days, with a loss of both salary and benefits during their absence.
This disciplinary action comes nearly a year after the shooting. The agency’s deputy director, Matt Quinn, told CBS News that the Secret Service would not “fire our way out of this” crisis.
