Local law enforcement screamed into their radios 102 times about a suspicious young man prowling the grounds of a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. The Secret Service never heard a single transmission. A Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report released Thursday lays out, in 64 pages, a cascade of institutional failures so thorough that a 20-year-old with a range finder, a long gun, and a consumer drone nearly succeeded in assassinating a former president of the United States.
The bullet grazed Donald Trump's ear, traveling less than an inch from his skull. One rallygoer died. Two others were injured. Thomas Crooks was killed by a law enforcement sniper. And the agency charged with protecting the nation's leaders, the DHS inspector general now concludes, missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt the attack.
The report identifies five distinct categories of failure, each one damning on its own, together forming a portrait of an agency that was not merely unlucky but operationally unprepared for the most basic elements of a protective security mission.
The central failure was structural. The Secret Service never established a joint communications room with local law enforcement at the Butler rally site. That meant two security operations ran on parallel tracks, unable to hear each other. Local officers spotted trouble early. Their warnings went nowhere.
The DHS Inspector General report states plainly:
"Ultimately, 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."
At 5:42 p.m., local officers were already alarmed. The New York Post reported that a local law enforcement radio transmission at that time described "a younger white male long hair lurking around the AGR building" who "was viewed with a rangefinder sighting the stage." Officers noted they had lost sight of him.
By 6:09 p.m., local law enforcement called the Secret Service and Pennsylvania State Police communications room directly, warning that a suspicious person was on the roof of the American Glass Research International complex, a building just 155 yards from the stage. Two minutes later, at 6:11 p.m., Crooks opened fire.
Out of 102 radio calls, the Secret Service received only five phone calls and three text messages about Crooks. The inspector general's language is blunt: Secret Service decision-makers responsible for protecting Trump while he stood on stage "were not made aware of Crooks' presence at any time."
The report's most striking detail involves the Secret Service counter drone operator. When word finally reached the command post that a suspicious person had climbed onto the AGR rooftop, this operator, described in the report as "undertrained", did not ask the local officers standing nearby where the building was. Instead, as the DHS report details, the operator searched for the AGR complex's location online.
The inspector general's finding is worth reading in full:
"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."
The communications room supervisor, meanwhile, told investigators he did not even recall learning that the suspicious person was on the roof. His explanation: he had "delegated communications about the suspicious person to the counter drone operator because it was a 'busy time' on Secret Service radios and the counter drone operator was sitting near him and offered to help."
A busy time on the radios. A man with a rifle on a rooftop 155 yards from the stage. And the supervisor handed off the problem to an undertrained colleague who responded by opening a browser.
Hours before the rally, Crooks flew a consumer drone over the event site for approximately nine minutes, a reconnaissance flight that should have set off every alarm the Secret Service had. It set off none.
The agency's own counter drone system was out of service. The single operator assigned to it had not tested the equipment before the event. The Washington Times reported that the operator was described as "under-trained," and the system's inoperability meant Crooks' preparatory flight went completely undetected.
The Secret Service knew it had a line-of-sight problem from the AGR complex to the stage. The inspector general found that the agency identified this concern before the event. Available resources existed to block that sightline. They were not used.
The Washington Times also reported a telling detail: a Secret Service site agent had proposed positioning trucks to block sightlines to the stage, but Trump campaign staff rejected the idea over concerns about press photography. A backup plan was never verified as carried out.
Pennsylvania State Police shared its security plan with the Secret Service ahead of the rally. That plan showed the area outside the perimeter, the area that included the AGR complex, would be unsecure. The Secret Service failed to act on that information.
The inspector general found the agency also failed to share intelligence about a long-distance threat to Trump with its own Pittsburgh Field Office leadership or the lead and site agents at the event. The result: insufficient personnel for the rally. The broader question of whether the Secret Service's structure within DHS contributes to these failures has already prompted bipartisan legislative action.
The AGR complex rooftop, the position from which Crooks fired, sat outside the Secret Service perimeter. The agency knew the building offered a direct line of sight to the stage. It did not station agents there. It did not block the sightline. And when local officers began reporting a suspicious man with a range finder near that very building, the Secret Service could not hear them.
The Butler failures did not occur in a vacuum. In the months since, the Secret Service has faced additional scrutiny over its operational readiness. A separate incident at the White House Correspondents' Dinner raised fresh questions about the agency's ability to respond under fire.
Then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who testified before the House Oversight Committee after the Butler shooting, called the event the agency's "most significant operational failure" in decades. But she repeatedly refused to answer specific questions about what went wrong, deferring to the FBI's ongoing investigation. National Review reported that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer stated bluntly: "Americans demand answers, but they have not been getting them from the Secret Service."
Whistleblowers told the committee the Butler rally was understaffed due to competing Secret Service demands, including the NATO summit, a Jill Biden event in Pittsburgh, and a Kamala Harris campaign stop in Philadelphia, all on the same day. Comer called for Cheatle's resignation.
The agency's credibility problems have only deepened since. A Secret Service agent was arrested in Miami on a public indecency allegation after working a Trump security detail, another episode in a pattern of conduct issues that undercuts public confidence in the agency's professionalism.
A Secret Service spokesperson said the agency concurred with the inspector general's recommendations. The statement offered the kind of language federal agencies reach for when the findings are indefensible:
"Many of these recommendations were already identified... and have since been implemented as part of our ongoing reform efforts."
The report is described as one of several investigations into the assassination attempt. Thomas Crooks' motive, meanwhile, largely remains a mystery.
What is not a mystery is what happened on the ground. Local cops saw the threat. They radioed it in, 102 times. The Secret Service never heard them. The agency's drone system was broken. Its operator was untrained. Its communications supervisor delegated the crisis to someone who responded by searching Google. The rooftop was unsecured. The sightline was unblocked. The intelligence was unshared. And the man on stage, the man the entire operation existed to protect, came within a fraction of an inch of losing his life.
When an agency's own inspector general concludes it "missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt" an assassination attempt, the word "reform" does not quite cover it. Accountability does.