Six U.S. Secret Service agents of different ranks have been suspended without pay in connection with last year’s assassination attempt against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In recent months, suspensions ranging from 10 to 42 days were handed down for the agents’ failure to prevent a 20-year-old gunman from positioning himself on a nearby roof and firing at Trump on July 13, 2024, ABC News reported.
A bullet grazed Trump’s ear and a firefighter attending the rally, Corey Comperatore, was killed in the crossfire. Secret Service counter-snipers killed the shooter, who was identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.
The Secret Service agents who were suspended range in seniority from supervisory level to line agent level, ABC reported. They have the right to appeal.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Less than two weeks after the attack, then-director Kimberly Cheatle stepped down as head of the Secret Service, saying she took “full responsibility for the security lapse” that led to the deadly shooting.
Local law enforcement officers had flagged Crooks as suspicious at least 90 minutes before he took aim at Trump, but did not immediately approach him and later lost track of him, their text messages showed.
A Senate briefing revealed that Secret Service agents first spotted Crooks on a rooftop 10 minutes before Trump came on stage and 20 minutes before he opened fired, NBC News reported.
The Secret Service had put local law enforcement in charge of securing nearby rooftops. Cheatle’s successor, acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe, testified before Congress that he was “ashamed” that Crooks was able to get into position for such a clear shot at the then-candidate.
“I laid in a prone position to evaluate his line of sight,” Rowe said. “What I saw made me ashamed. As a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year veteran with the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured to prevent similar lapses from occurring in the future.”
In December, a House task force investigating the assassination attempt concluded the incident was “preventable” but that there wasn’t one specific moment or decision that enabled Crooks to “nearly assassinate” Trump, NBC News reported. The report resulted in nearly a dozen recommendations for the Secret Service.
Nearly a year after the attacks, Crooks’ motive remains a mystery, The New York Times reported in June. The recent community college graduate was a registered Republican who was skeptical of the federal government and of corporations.
The FBI said he also might have authored anti-immigrant and antisemitic social media posts.
He was reportedly highly intelligent and planning to apply to four-year university programs in engineering. At the same time, he was struggling with his mental health, and had researched high-profile members of both political parties before the shooting.
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