No one was in charge of planning and security decisions for the July 13 campaign rally where former President Donald J. Trump was shot, according to a preliminary report released Wednesday by a Senate committee that described a withering list of Secret Service failings.
Diffuse and blurred leadership roles for the event in Butler, Pa., led to communications breakdowns and security lapses, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee found. There was confusion over who was supposed to secure the building from which the gunman opened fire. There were multiple plans in place, none of them definitive. There were urgent warnings that were picked up but then dropped.
The report painted a portrait of hapless on-site leadership unaware of potential threats to Mr. Trump’s safety and a culture within the agency of individuals unwilling to take responsibility for those failures. Even after many hours of testimony, the committee said that no one involved in the rally’s security plans could say who made the call to exclude from the security perimeter a set of nearby warehouses, one of which the gunman eventually climbed onto and used as a perch to shoot at Mr. Trump.
“Everybody points fingers at someone else,” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the top Republican on the panel, said in remarks to reporters on Tuesday.
The committee report also describes an agency struggling with the basics of operating technology to do its job, with agents who had faulty radios and nonfunctioning drone-detection devices. An agent with only three months’ training on the drone equipment could not get it to work and turned to calling a toll-free tech support hotline “to start troubleshooting with the company,” which took several hours.
Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan and the committee’s chairman, stressed the panel would continue digging into the 2,800 pages of documents obtained from law enforcement and pushing for more interviews before issuing a final report. The interim report details multiple information requests that have yet to be answered.
“These problems, unfortunately, continue to remain unaddressed, and that must change,” Mr. Peters said.
Many aspects of the report largely echoed the findings of an investigation by The New York Times that noted disorganized communications, dropped security warnings and a lack of personnel as contributors to the assassination attempt. But the committee’s work added new detail, testimony and findings.
The Secret Service had “credible intelligence” of a threat to Mr. Trump before he took the stage for the rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds, but the agency failed to take the necessary steps to stop an attempt on his life, the report found.
Before the gunman, Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., climbed atop the warehouse, the Secret Service had identified the building as a potentially vulnerable area. But it left the roof nevertheless unmanned.
Technology breakdowns also hurt the agency that day. Radio communications were hampered by technical failures that rendered some devices inoperable. One agent was so busy trying to fix his own radio that he failed to pick up the local police radio he had been offered. Had he grabbed that radio, he would have heard the local police traffic describing a suspicious person, who turned out to be Mr. Crooks, in real time.
And Secret Service site leadership was largely out of the loop as critical security information was picked up by frontline officers.
Among those interviewed for the 94-page document was the lead Secret Service counter sniper, unnamed in the report, who detailed the chaos and the communication breakdowns.
The lead counter sniper, identified by The Times as John Marciniak, conducted advance work for the event and also worked as part of the two-man counter-sniper team that ultimately shot and killed Mr. Crooks. He testified that the had been aware of a potentially serious security risk before Mr. Crooks fired shots. But he told the committee that he never considered sharing that information with the agents who were standing close to Mr. Trump.
“When we looked, just plain eyes, no optics or anything, you could see police running towards the building with their hands on their pistols,” Mr. Marciniak told the committee. “I think one actually had a pistol facing towards the ground, out of a holster. That’s a pretty big deal for us, so immediately we turned and faced our guns towards the threat area.”
Nonetheless, added Mr. Marciniak, the thought of notifying Mr. Trump’s shift agents so they could get him off the stage at that moment “did not cross my mind.”
As for the other top Secret Service leaders at the site, they did not even receive the information about a suspicious man — and that he had a range finder — until Mr. Crooks fired his shots, the report found.
One of those leaders, called the site counterpart, told the committee that she did not know what was going on. It quotes her as saying, “I can’t put out fires that I don’t know exist.”
The service’s decision-making, which involved compiling resource requests and relaying them to supervisors in Washington for approval and coordinating asks between Mr. Trump’s detail and the local field office, led to confusion. Even now, it remains uncertain who was assigned with setting the inner perimeter for event security — a crucial designation that determines the area of responsibility for the Secret Service as well as for local law enforcement.
During Congressional interviews, the very agents who were collectively in charge of securing the event said the specific lines of responsibility were murky.
“Key U.S.S.S. personnel responsible for planning, coordinating, communicating and securing the Butler, Pa. rally on July 13, declined to acknowledge individual areas of responsibility for planning or security as having contributed to the failure to prevent the shooting that day,” the report states. “U.S.S.S. Advance Agents told the Committee that planning and security decisions were made jointly, with no specific individual responsible for approval.”
The committee also did not get a clear answer as to who held responsibility for securing the roofs of the warehouses, which are owned by the manufacturer AGR International, from which the gunman opened fire.
“There were several different plans in place, different pieces of the puzzle from the advance that all had their own stake in making sure that that building was not accessible,” the lead advance agent, who has been identified by The Times as Meredith Bank, told the committee.
The special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh office, who is listed on a preliminary personnel document that has been reviewed by The Times as one of the senior-most people involved in the event, described his role as, essentially, tangential.
The supervisory agent — whom The Times has identified as Timothy Burke — described his duties this way: “I’m there just if something comes up and somebody needs help or if there’s something with our local or state partners or something else comes up — I’m there to help assist with that.”
However, Mr. Burke could not, in fact, communicate easily with fellow agents at the Butler rally because he had given his own radio to Ms. Bank after she discovered that hers wasn’t working properly, he told the committee.
Mr. Burke also noted that he had not been made aware of what the report describes as “credible intelligence” of potential violence against Mr. Trump — later identified as a state-sponsored assassination attempt from Iran — and might have pushed for either different security measures or a relocation of the event indoors had he known.
The committee found that Mr. Burke never received a copy of the operational security plan.
The agency’s efforts were riddled with numerous other failures of both equipment and communication, the report states.
Because of technical issues, the Secret Service had “no drone detection capabilities” until very close to the event’s slated starting time, making it impossible for the service to flag Mr. Crook’s own drone surveillance of the rally site in the hours before the event.
Freight trucks, which could have helped block a potential shooter’s line of sight to the stage, were available nearby, the report said. But they were never placed between the warehouse and the stage, and it was not clear why.
During their interviews, senators said that while they did not suspect anyone of attempting to mislead Congress, they were troubled by some testimony, said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.
“There’s no evidence that anybody lied to us. At the same time, there are a lot of indications of sheer incompetence or absence of recollection that create additional doubts about what was done on July, 13,” he said.
In the aftermath of July 13, Kimberly A. Cheatle, the former Secret Service director, resigned. But Mr. Paul suggested more repercussions were necessary.
“Whoever was in charge of security on the day of Butler, whoever’s in charge of security during the recent assassination attempt, those people can’t be in charge,” he said.
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