A new DHS Inspector General report finds the Secret Service missed 102 radio calls, ran a broken counter-drone system and never set up a joint command post with local police before Thomas Crooks opened fire on President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General has confirmed what conservatives have argued since July 13, 2024: the Secret Service had the chance to stop Thomas Crooks before he ever pulled the trigger on Donald Trump, and blew it. The watchdog's report, released this week, concludes the agency "missed multiple opportunities" to prevent or disrupt the assassination attempt that left Trump with a bloodied ear, one rally-goer dead and two others wounded.
The failures are not abstract. Local law enforcement officers posted near the AGR International building tried repeatedly to warn Secret Service personnel that a man was acting suspiciously with a rangefinder, then that he was on the roof with what looked like a long gun. Those warnings never reached the agents protecting Trump. The report found protective units were stationed 257 yards apart with spotty radio connectivity, and because the Secret Service never established a joint communications room with Butler-area police, its personnel missed 102 separate radio transmissions about Crooks in the run-up to the shooting.
Crooks flew a reconnaissance drone over the rally site hours before the event, according to the OIG. The Secret Service had a counter-drone system in place that day. It did not work. The report attributes the failure to a single, under-trained operator who never tested the equipment before Trump took the stage. That gap let Crooks scope his position undetected, then climb onto the roof of a building just 155 yards from the podium with a clear, unobstructed line of sight to the president.
None of this happened in a vacuum. The Secret Service's overall lack of policy and process, combined with poor coordination between the agency, Trump's protective detail and state and local police, created what investigators describe as a cascading failure rather than a single point of blame. The inspector general's team interviewed dozens of agents, local officers and Secret Service supervisors over the past year, cross-referencing radio logs, drone telemetry and site survey documents to reconstruct the minute-by-minute breakdown. What emerges is a picture of an agency that treated a presidential campaign rally like a routine assignment, even though Trump had already survived years of documented threats against his life.
Investigators found that the counter-sniper teams assigned to the rally never received a copy of the building layout showing the AGR International roof had a sightline to the stage. That omission alone, the report states, should have been caught during the standard security walk-through that Secret Service advance teams are required to conduct days before a principal's arrival. Instead, the advance team flagged the building as a potential vulnerability but left it to local police to monitor, without confirming that Butler officers actually had eyes on the roof at the moment Trump began speaking.
The report also faults the Secret Service's Pittsburgh field office for understaffing the detail. Internal staffing requests obtained by investigators show the office asked for additional counter-sniper and counter-surveillance personnel for the Butler rally, a request that was only partially filled. Agency leadership has since acknowledged that Secret Service personnel are stretched thin across an unusually heavy 2024 campaign travel schedule, juggling protection for Trump, President Biden, Vice President Harris and a growing list of other protectees.
Since the shooting, the Secret Service has cycled through leadership. Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned within days of the incident after a widely criticized congressional hearing in which she struggled to answer basic questions about the sightline failure. Her successor, Ronald Rowe, testified that the agency had begun implementing dozens of corrective measures, including mandatory joint command posts for all campaign events, upgraded radio interoperability with local law enforcement and new counter-drone equipment with redundant operators. The new report will almost certainly reopen scrutiny of whether those fixes have actually taken hold.
Members of Congress from both parties have signaled they plan to use the findings to press for further hearings. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have called the report proof that accountability at the Secret Service remains incomplete, while some Democrats have joined in demanding a fuller accounting of the agency's staffing and technology gaps, arguing the failures endanger any president or candidate, regardless of party.
The Secret Service, in a statement responding to the inspector general, said it "accepts the findings" and has already implemented most of the recommended reforms, though it did not specify a timeline for completing the rest. With the 2026 midterm campaign season already underway and Secret Service protection extending to a wider field of political figures than ever before, the report leaves an open question hanging over the agency: whether the lessons of Butler have actually been learned, or whether the next crowded rally will expose the same gaps all over again.
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