Left to right, Sgt. Edward Lenz, Adams Township Police Department, Commander, Butler County Emergency Services Unit; Patrolman Drew Blasko, Butler Township Police Department; Lt. John Herold, Pennsylvania State Police; and Patrick Sullivan, former United States Secret Service agent, are sworn in during the first hearing of the Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump in the Longworth House Office Building on Sept. 26, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Members of the U.S. House task force investigating the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Thursday blamed the U.S. Secret Service for poor planning and breakdowns in communication and coordination with local law enforcement.
Republicans and Democrats on the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump at their first public hearing praised the work of local law enforcement agencies, representatives of which testified at the hearing.
Lawmakers said initial investigations showed it was the Secret Service who was responsible for a lack of planning, information-sharing and decision-making.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the attempted assassin, at a July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, scouted the site in the days ahead of Trump’s rally and found security vulnerabilities, task force Chair Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican, said.
If those weaknesses were not apparent to the 20-year-old gunman, the entire incident may have been avoided, Kelly added.
But the shooting that injured Trump’s ear and killed one rallygoer was caused by more than one breakdown, he said.
“It was not a single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our country’s most elite” security agencies, Kelly said. “There were security failures on multiple fronts.”
The Secret Service, which is the lead agency during any event in which a person under the agency’s protection is present, did not create a sufficient plan and was not decisive on key questions, Kelly said. The agency did not manage access to sites adjacent to the rally and did not effectively communicate with state and local partners, he added.
Testimony from local agencies
Local officials told the panel they felt prepared in their assignment of assisting the Secret Service protection.
Commander Edward Lenz of the Butler County Emergency Services Unit said the Secret Service had requested help from counter-assault teams, sniper teams and a quick reaction force and that the local agency felt prepared for those missions.
“There were additional things, obviously, that probably needed (to be) covered,” he said. “But they never asked us to do that, they never tasked us with that. So given what they specifically asked us to do, we were certainly prepared.”
He added that sniper teams had not been given specific instructions for their mission.
Patrolman Drew Blasko of the Butler Township Police Department said local police executed what had been asked of them.
“With the information that we had, I believe that we did the very best that we could,” Blasko said.
No unified command
The task force’s ranking Democrat, Colorado’s Jason Crow, who is an Army veteran, highlighted a failure to communicate.
“Clear lines of communication are crucial,” he said during an opening statement. “The Secret Service must do better.”
Later, while questioning witnesses, Crow said he was surprised to learn the Secret Service did not establish a unified command center for the Butler rally.
Patrick Sullivan, a former Secret Service agent who testified in his personal capacity, said that was atypical for a Secret Service operation.
Usually, a central command post is established for the Secret Service, state and local agencies and any other assisting law enforcement, Sullivan said.
“This is very unusual, the way it turned out here in this site,” he said.
A unified command center can help relay information from disparate teams, including warning the agents closest to the president or presidential candidate of a suspicious person.
Pennsylvania Democrat Chrissy Houlahan noted that the communications breakdown between Secret Service and local authorities happened because they were not on the same radio frequencies.
“So here we were with three minutes and every second counting, and the Secret Service and the state police weren’t able to directly hear what local law enforcement actually saw, because they didn’t have that interoperability with local law enforcement frequencies and didn’t have possession of those radios,” she said.
She called for reforms to require different agencies are able to communicate with each other.
Slipped through cracks
Crooks was spotted multiple times throughout the day and identified by local police as suspicious, Kelly said.
Crooks was operating in an unsecured area “where information about him was both delayed and limited,” Kelly said.
Sullivan told Ohio Republican David Joyce that authorities could have used several methods to secure adjacent sites, suggesting the most effective way could have been to station officers there.
Local police spotted Crooks, identified him as suspicious and passed information on to the Pennsylvania State Police and the Secret Service, Lenz said.
But that information did not reach the Secret Service in time to remove Trump from the stage before the shooting began, Kelly said.
“The Secret Service could not process the information fast enough to pull the former president from the stage,” Kelly added.
The chairman wondered why Trump was allowed to go on stage after Crooks had been flagged several times.
“I’m constantly going to be wondering, at what point did somebody say, ‘We’re not sure the area is secure and safe,’” Kelly said.
First hearing
After two months of investigation, the Thursday meeting marked the first public hearing for the task force, which the House voted unanimously to form in the aftermath of the Butler shooting.
The Secret Service has borne the brunt of the blame for the shooting.
Then-Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned under pressure in the days following the attempted assassination.
Acting Director Ronald Rowe said last week the incident was “a failure of the United States Secret Service” and pledged it would spark a “paradigm shift” in how the agency operates.
The importance of Secret Service protection and the task force’s mission was highlighted again this month when a man who’d been hiding in the bushes of Trump’s Florida golf club was arrested and charged with another attempted assassination.
Members of both parties on the panel condemned targeting political candidates Thursday.
“Political violence has no place in our democracy, period,” Crow said.
Trump said this week he will return to Butler on Oct. 5 to “finish our speech.”