Bipartisan task force slams beleaguered Secret Service in new report

The deadly shooting at a July 13 Donald Trump rally was preventable, but multiple security failures allowed a 20-year-old gunman to climb atop an unsecured roof and fire eight shots, killing an attendee and wounding Trump and two others, the bipartisan House task force investigating the attack wrote in a preliminary report released Monday.

The task force’s 53-page report, which is based on 23 interviews with state and local law enforcement officials, thousands of pages of documents obtained by federal, state and local agencies, and briefings from Secret Service and the FBI, details the failures that allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., this summer.

Inadequate planning and coordination between local and federal law enforcement, fragmented lines of communication between law enforcement agencies and the failure to establish a secure perimeter were among the mistakes that allowed Crooks to not only access the unsecured roof but also move freely around the property for hours before the rally, the task force’s members argued in their report.

The report largely echoes preliminary reports released by the Secret Service and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee last month.

“Put simply, the evidence obtained by the Task Force to date shows the tragic and shocking events of July 13 were preventable and should not have happened,” the lawmakers who wrote the report concluded.

Several of the report’s key findings were already publicly known, but interviews with local law enforcement officials provided more details on the Secret Service’s failure to adequately prepare for the rally and establish day-of lines of communication between local and federal law enforcement officials.

State and local law enforcement officials who spoke to the task force were critical of the lack of a unified command post and communications hub for state and local police, Secret Service and other federal partners. They also criticized a lack of “a unified briefing” between all entities ahead of the rally that “may have led to gaps in awareness among state and local law enforcement partners as to who was stationed where, spheres of responsibility, and expectations regarding communications during the day.”

The task force will continue to interview federal and local officials familiar with the events of July 13 in the next phase of its investigation, while expanding its scope to also investigate how a second gunman was allowed to come within several hundred yards of Trump on Sept. 15 at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida.

A separate independent panel that released its own findings on the July 13 incident last week called for dramatic change at the U.S. Secret Service. The panel concluded that the protective agency had become “bureaucratic, complacent and static,” calling for new leadership from outside the agency.

The bipartisan task force did not offer recommendations for the agency in its report. But it offered a scathing assessment of the security failures that led to the shooting.

“In the days leading up to the rally, it was not a single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our country’s most elite group of security professionals. There were security failures on multiple fronts,” Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), chairman of the task force, said in a statement.