A Secret Service counter drone operator was searching Google for the location of the rooftop where Thomas Crooks had positioned himself, rather than simply asking local law enforcement officers nearby, when the gunman opened fire on President Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally on July 13, 2024. That detail sits near the center of a damning 64-page Department of Homeland Security inspector general report that concludes the agency missed "multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt" the attempted assassination.
The report, released Thursday by the DHS Office of Inspector General, lays out a cascading series of communications breakdowns, poor decisions, and institutional failures that left the president's protective detail completely unaware that a man with a rifle was lying on a rooftop 155 yards from the stage.
Crooks fired eight shots. One grazed Trump's ear. Others wounded rally attendees. One person in the crowd was killed. Crooks was shot and killed by law enforcement shortly after he opened fire. None of it had to happen, not if the Secret Service had done its job.
Local law enforcement spotted trouble early. At 5:42 p.m., a radio transmission warned that officers had seen "a younger white male long hair lurking around the AGR building, he was viewed with a rangefinder sighting the stage... we lost sight of him." The AGR building, the American Glass Research International complex, sat just 155 yards from where Trump would take the stage.
Twenty-six minutes later, at 6:08 p.m., another local officer radioed: "I have someone on the roof with white shorts."
At 6:09 p.m., local law enforcement called the Secret Service and Pennsylvania State Police communications room to warn of a suspicious person on the AGR complex roof. The Secret Service communications room supervisor received that call, and delegated the matter to the counter drone operator. His reason, the report states, was that it was a "busy time" on Secret Service radios and the counter drone operator "was sitting near him and offered to help."
What happened next defies belief. The inspector general found that neither the supervisor nor the counter drone operator asked local law enforcement for the AGR complex's location. The supervisor "did not immediately identify it as a risk." And the counter drone operator, rather than turning to the local officers who already knew exactly where the building was, pulled up a search engine.
"Instead of asking local law enforcement personnel for the AGR complex's location, the counter drone operator searched online for it, and was still searching when Crooks fired his first shots."
At 6:11 p.m., a local officer transmitted: "He's armed, I saw him. He's laying down." Seconds later: "You need to deploy to the AGR building... male on the roof with a long gun. Shots fired!"
Two minutes. That was the gap between the Secret Service being directly informed of a man on the roof and Crooks pulling the trigger. Two minutes in which the protective detail around the president received no warning at all.
The communications failure went far deeper than one distracted operator. The inspector general found that 102 radio transmissions from local law enforcement about the gunman went unheard by Secret Service personnel. The agency received only five phone calls and three text messages about Crooks before the shooting.
The reason was structural. The Secret Service never established a joint communications room with local law enforcement at the Butler rally site. Local officers were broadcasting urgent, escalating warnings on their own channels. The Secret Service was not listening.
The report states flatly: "Although members of the local law enforcement communications room were increasingly concerned by the presence of a suspicious individual as early as 5:42 p.m., Secret Service communications room personnel did not identify Crooks as an urgent threat before he fired shots."
And then the most damning line: "Secret Service decision-makers responsible for protecting President Trump while on stage at the Butler event were not made aware of Crooks' presence at any time."
The people whose sole job was to keep the president alive did not know a rifleman was on a nearby rooftop. Not when he was spotted with a rangefinder. Not when he climbed onto the roof. Not when a local officer saw the long gun. Not until the bullets were already in the air.
The failures began before the rally even started. On July 12, 2024, the day before the event, a Secret Service site agent counterpart proposed placing trucks between the AGR complex and the stage to block the line of sight from the building. The inspector general report states that "protectee staff denied the request because the trucks would be 'too close to [President Trump's] press shot.'"
The site agent counterpart then proposed moving the trucks to a different nearby location, which would block the line of sight from a different area. Protectee staff agreed to that alternative. But the original vulnerability, the AGR rooftop with a direct sightline to the stage, remained open.
The Newsmax report on the inspector general's findings noted that Crooks had also flown a drone over the rally site for nearly nine minutes undetected, because the Secret Service's counter-drone system was inoperable and operated by a single, under-trained operator. The agency's own technology failed alongside its people.
The Secret Service has agreed to all seven recommendations outlined in the report and says many reforms have already been implemented. The agency did not immediately respond to the New York Post's request for comment on the findings.
The Butler disaster did not happen in a vacuum. A separate inspector general report found that the Secret Service counter-sniper team was staffed 73 percent below the level necessary to meet mission requirements. Between 2021 and 2024, the agency paid nearly a quarter-million overtime hours to keep counter-sniper teams operational. In 2024, counter snipers who had missed mandatory weapons requalification still supported 47 of 426 protectee events, roughly 11 percent.
Inspector General Joseph Cufari warned that the staffing crisis risked "injury or assassination, and subsequent national-level harm to the country's sense of safety and security."
The political fallout was swift. Fox News reported that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle acknowledged the agency was "solely responsible" for the design and execution of security at the Butler rally. She offered a now-infamous explanation for why the AGR building roof was not secured with agents: "That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof."
Crooks, of course, had no trouble getting up there.
Congressional Republicans demanded accountability. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Cheatle to testify, and House Speaker Mike Johnson declared: "We must have accountability for this. It was inexcusable." Multiple investigations were launched, including the DHS inspector general probe, a congressional hearing, a House task force, and an independent review. Cheatle told ABC News that "the buck stops with me," but lawmakers accused DHS of actively preventing the Secret Service from cooperating with congressional inquiries.
The questions raised by Butler have not gone away. Legislators from both parties have since introduced a bipartisan bill that would pull the Secret Service out of DHS entirely and place it directly under the White House, a structural overhaul that reflects deep bipartisan frustration with the agency's chain of command.
The Butler failures look even worse in light of what came after. In April 2026, a gunman opened fire near the White House Correspondents' Dinner in what the DOJ has charged as another attempted assassination of President Trump. In that incident, a single wounded Secret Service officer was reportedly the only agent who returned fire at the gunman.
The agency charged with protecting the president has now faced two assassination attempts in under two years. The inspector general's report on Butler reads less like a one-time breakdown and more like a portrait of an institution that has lost its operational edge, understaffed, poorly coordinated, and too slow to act on the most basic threat information.
One hundred and two radio warnings. A man on a rooftop with a rifle in plain sight of local officers. A Secret Service agent typing a building name into Google while the president stood exposed 155 yards away.
The report calls these "missed opportunities." Most Americans would call them something else entirely.
When the people responsible for protecting the president can't even ask a cop for directions, the problem isn't a sloped roof. It's an agency that has forgotten what its mission actually requires.