WASHINGTON — The Secret Service made a series of “foreseeable” and “preventable” mistakes before the July assassination attempt on Donald Trump that allowed a gunman to kill a Trump rally attendee and graze the Republican presidential primary. Candidate’s ear, senators in both parties pay.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee and its Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations issued a joint interim report Wednesday on the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, saying responsibility was unclear ahead of the July 13 rally and that personnel they interviewed were responsible. planning “distracted guilt”.
While the Secret Service acknowledged “ultimate responsibility” for the failure to prevent Trump’s shooting, the report said key Secret Service personnel “refused to acknowledge that separate areas of responsibility for planning or security contributed to the failure to prevent the attack. filming that day.”
The report also highlights the kinds of technological problems common to huge federal bureaucracies like the Secret Service.
Among the errors identified in the report: The Secret Service knew that it planned to deploy snipers with local law enforcement inside the building where the shooter eventually opened fire, rather than on the roof. Communications were disrupted and the Secret Service “failed to ensure real-time information sharing with local law enforcement partners,” the report said.
Another example in the report: After a sniper with local law enforcement sent a message to the leader of a Secret Service counter-sniper team about the man who would soon shoot Trump, it took seven minutes for the head of the Secret Service to email about it. information and photos. It’s unclear how long it took for other members of the Secret Service sniper team to read the letter, titled “Local CS BOLO,” meaning “be on the lookout,” and a member of the counter-sniper team said the email was “vaguely worded.” .”
The report also noted that other components of the Secret Service declined Trump’s requests for details, including a request to contact a counterattack team to coordinate tactical teams that day.
The Secret Service released the information own internal report last week.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who chairs the investigative subcommittee, called the Secret Service an “Abbott and Costello-style ‘Who’s on First?’ said that he was busy with finger pointing after the attack”.
Blumenthal stressed the report was interim and said there were too many unanswered questions, adding that the Department of Homeland Security had “less future” than the American people needed and deserved.
“If I had to point to a solution here … chain of command would be at the top of the list,” Blumenthal said.
“I think we should be surprised and be surprised by this kind of rambling on the site, not sharing intelligence,” he said. “What happened here was really an accumulation of mistakes that led to an amazing storm of failure. In a sense, many of these individual failings, if corrected in time, could have prevented this tragedy. And obviously it was a tragedy. “One person died, the former president was almost killed, and it was completely prevented from the beginning.”
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters, D-Mich., cited the report’s “interim” nature as evidence that the investigation is ongoing.
“Our reporting was also two-sided,” Peters told NBC News. “So we take the politics out of it, just look at the facts, and the more facts we put out, the better people will understand what’s really going on.”
Peters emphasized that it is “absolutely important to get the facts out as soon as possible, because when there is a gap in information, conspiracy theories will always emerge.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., a Trump supporter previousutreacherous watergested that the January 6 riot was mostly a “peaceful protest” apart from some “agitators”, and also offered without proof the government may have played a role in the shooting. On Tuesday, he alleged that the Secret Service had “thwarted” a congressional investigation.
“They are taking this investigation slowly. I think this committee should start issuing subpoenas,” said Johnson, the top Republican on the investigative subcommittee. “It’s a governance problem, plain and simple. You can keep throwing money at it, but if you don’t solve the governance problem, you’re not going to solve the problem.”
The report also highlighted the Secret Service bureaucracy and its struggles with technological innovation and effective communication.
The agency used the Counter-Drone System at Butler to combat the unmanned drones that Trump’s assassination attempt used that day, but the frontline agent operating the device immediately had trouble with it, according to the report. The agent then moved the device away from the satellite trucks that were in the rally but still having problems. According to the report, even after calling the 888 technical support hotline operated by the manufacturer, the system did not work.
Eventually, one of the tech support staff said the system’s components weren’t communicating, and the agent grabbed an Ethernet cable from the Trump campaign’s audio-visual production staff and finally turned the system on at 4:33 p.m. according to the report.
The only problem, according to the report, was that Trump’s assassination attempt had stopped flying the drone about half an hour earlier and had an 11-minute flight that began at 3:51 p.m.