The U.S. Secret Service missed multiple opportunities to prevent the July 2024 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a 64-page report released Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. The document details a series of security lapses that allowed gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks to obtain a line of sight to Trump on stage, fire eight shots, and strike the former president in the ear before being neutralized.
The report highlights that the Secret Service’s overall lack of policy and processes, combined with limited intelligence sharing and poor collaboration with protectee staff and state and local law enforcement, set the conditions that led to missed opportunities. Among the critical failures was the agency’s inability to warn Trump’s protective detail that Crooks had a range finder and a long gun and had climbed onto the roof of a nearby building. This breakdown occurred because the Secret Service and local law enforcement operated from separate command posts located 257 yards apart, with intermittent and highly limited radio connectivity between them.
As a result, the Secret Service missed 102 radio transmissions regarding an increasingly intense search for a suspicious individual, including alerts that the suspect was on the roof with a long gun. Because the Secret Service communications room received only a handful of phone calls and texts, agents failed to recognize the urgency of the threat and never warned Trump’s protective detail to delay the speech or remove him from the stage. Paul Eckloff, a former Secret Service agent, told Fox News Digital that communications were a problem due to inoperability and too many command posts, adding that the biggest failure was accepting the risk of holding the event at that site, which had an egregious line of sight from the roof.
Crooks fired eight shots, grazing Trump in the ear and killing 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, who was attending the rally. Two other spectators were critically injured but survived. Secret Service agents rushed the stage and moved Trump to safety moments after the shooting. The report also found that the Secret Service failed to detect Crooks’ drone flight, which he used to view the campaign event stage less than three hours before the rally, due to an under-trained operator and an equipment malfunction. Crooks flew the drone undetected for almost nine minutes, covering 471 yards from the event stage at an altitude of 102 feet.
The agency had a counter-drone system on site during the rally, but it malfunctioned and was not operational when Crooks flew his drone hours before the attack. Additionally, the Secret Service failed to share intelligence about a long-distance threat to Trump with the Pittsburgh field office and agents on site. Agents also failed to secure the area outside the security perimeter and did not use available resources to block Crooks’ line of sight from the roof of the American Glass Research International building to Trump, despite identifying the AGR complex as a line-of-sight vulnerability during advanced walkthroughs.
Officials originally proposed using trucks already on site to block the view from the AGR complex, but Trump’s campaign staff rejected the idea because it would interfere with press photographs. An agent proposed a secondary location for the trucks but never verified that the campaign staff actually moved the equipment. As a result, Crooks had an unobstructed view of Trump’s podium from a distance of just 155 yards. The report offers several recommendations to improve the Secret Service’s processes for securing events, including mandatory threat communication, enhanced counter-drone training, and a process to formally document the identification and blocking of line-of-sight vulnerabilities.
The findings underscore systemic failures in communication, intelligence sharing, and site security that could have been prevented with better coordination and adherence to protocols. The Secret Service and the White House have been contacted for comment, but no response has been reported as of Thursday. The report’s release adds to ongoing scrutiny of the agency’s handling of security for high-profile events, particularly in the wake of the assassination attempt that left one dead and several injured.