The Secret Service failed to protect President Donald Trump from an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a Senate report has found on the one-year anniversary of the attack.
“This was not a single error. It was a cascade of preventable failures that nearly cost President Trump his life,” the report said. “The American people deserve better.”
Trump was shot at by 20-year-old Thomas Crooks while he was speaking at an open-air campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 last year. Trump, then a presidential candidate, sustained an injury to his right ear. Crooks’ shots killed a member of the audience, Corey Comperatore, and injured two others before he was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.
The report, which was released by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Sunday, said there was “a disturbing pattern of communication failures and negligence that culminated in a preventable tragedy.”
Among them, the report said, was that Crooks “was able to evade detection by the country’s top protective agency for nearly 45 minutes” before the 20-year-old fired at Trump.
Secret Service agents also failed to address line-of-sight vulnerabilities at the Butler venue despite being made aware of the issue in advance; put an inexperienced operator in charge of counter-unmanned aerial systems; and did not retrieve radios from local law enforcement officials to aid communication during the event.
The report called for harsher consequences for agency officials involved in protecting Trump during the Pennsylvania rally because those meted out “so far do not reflect the severity of the situation.”
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned less than two weeks after the assassination attempt, saying that she took “full responsibility for the security lapse.”
Six of the agency’s employees were also suspended without pay, with bans ranging from 10 to 42 days, NBC News reported, though it wasn’t clear when the officials were suspended.
The report said that the committee believes that more than six officials should have been sanctioned over their “action (or inaction)” and that “those who were disciplined received penalties far too weak to match the severity of the failures.”
The committee pledged to release a cache of subpoenaed documents “in the interests of transparency” over what happened in the run-up to the assassination attempt.
Republican politicians marked the first anniversary of the attempt on Trump’s life on social media today. Paying tribute, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump will “never stop fighting to put Americans first.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik wrote that “Americans will never forget that God was looking down on President Trump that fateful day and miraculously spared his life by a quarter of an inch” but said there were more questions to be answered over the incident.
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