Secret Service Was Told Of ‘Credible’ Threat To Trump Days Before Butler Rally

The Secret Service was warned of a “credible” threat in the days leading up to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, but failed to act accordingly, according to a damning bipartisan Senate report released Wednesday. 

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs released an interim report on the attack that detailed numerous “failures” by the Secret Service to secure the site and to respond to threats. 

“The Committee finds that USSS failures in planning, communications, security, and allocation of resources for the July 13, 2024 Butler rally were foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt that day,” the report said. “The Committee also finds that siloed communications and coordination problems between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials remain unaddressed and were a contributing factor to the failures at the July 13 Butler rally.”

The report said that the Secret Service Lead Advance Agent was made aware of a “credible intelligence” threat to Trump on July 9, but that she still reported that there was “no adverse intelligence” in a security planning document in preparation for the rally. In response to the threat, a Secret Service counter-sniper team was assigned to the rally, but almost no one was told of the threat. 

The Lead Advance Agent told the Senators that she was told of the threat by a Secret Service official who said he couldn’t discuss specifics of the threat. 

The committee said that only two Secret Service personnel interviewed by them “were made aware that there was a credible threat related to former President Trump prior to July 13, only one of whom was made aware of the classified information underlying the threat.”

Trump’s rally in Butler was the first time for a Secret Service sniper team to be assigned to anyone other than the president, the vice president, or an officially nominated candidate. Trump went on to be formally nominated at the Republican National Convention on July 15. The Senators said that they had not been able to find any more information on what the threat was. 

According to the report, the Secret Service also failed to secure the roof of the American Glass Research building, where Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to fire off eight rounds at Trump, striking the former president in the ear, killing one rallygoer, and injuring two others. 

Crooks was also able to “fly a drone 200 yards from the site, use a rangefinder capable of gauging the distance to the former president less than an hour before he began speaking, and bring two explosive devices within proximity of the site of the rally,” the report found. 

The report detailed that local law enforcement warned the Secret Service about the potential threat of the roof, but did not allocate resources to secure it. 

Furthermore, the Secret Service was informed that Crooks was on the roof of the building at least two minutes before he started shooting, yet Trump was not moved from the stage. Prior to that, they had known that a suspicious person was hanging around the AGR building for at least 27 minutes before the shooting. 

“Approximately 22 seconds before Crooks fired, a local officer sent out a radio alert that the individual on the AGR roof was armed, but that was not relayed to key USSS personnel that the Committee spoke with,” the report found. 

Just before shots were fired, a Secret Service counter-sniper saw local law enforcement running toward the building where Crooks was positioned, but “he did not alert former President Trump’s protective detail to remove him from the stage,” the report said. 

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The sniper reportedly told the committee that it “did not cross my mind” to notify someone to get Trump off the stage when he saw the local law enforcement running with their guns drawn. 

The Senators examined at least 2,800 pages of Secret Service documents and interviewed dozens of agents and local law enforcement officials. 

“Every single one of these actions is directly related to a failure in the U.S. Secret Service’s planning, communications, intelligence sharing and law enforcement coordination efforts,” Chairman Gary Peters said on Tuesday. “Every single one of those failures was preventable, and the consequences of those failures were dire.”