Communication Failures Plagued Deadly Trump Rally, Secret Service Finds

The agency found that it did not adequately prepare its local partners for the Butler, Pa., event, and its leader also cited lapses including complacency by some agents and technological breakdowns.

The Secret Service failed to give clear and crucial directions to its local law enforcement partners at a July campaign rally in Butler, Pa., allowing a would-be assassin to climb onto a warehouse and shoot at former President Donald J. Trump, an agency internal investigation has found.

The lapse was one of several damning findings in the summary of an internal investigation report the Secret Service released Friday in response to the shooting on July 13 at a Trump campaign rally where the former president was grazed by an assailant’s bullet. Three attendees at the event were wounded, one fatally.

During a news briefing on Friday in conjunction with the release of the summary, Ronald L. Rowe Jr., the acting director of the Secret Service, ticked off several other failures, including complacency by some advance team members charged with securing the site and technological breakdowns that if better managed could have thwarted the gunman.

Mr. Rowe said that while he could not discuss individual personnel matters, there would be consequences for agents responsible for deficiencies in the security plan and its implementation.

“These employees will be held accountable, and this agency has among the most robust stable of penalties in the entirety of the federal government,” he said.

Read the Summary of the Secret Service’s Internal Review

The agency released a brief summary of its monthslong inquiry into the failures leading to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July. The complete report is not yet finished.

Read Document 5 pages

Already, the agency has placed five agents on restricted duty and parted ways with its director.

The assassination attempt by Thomas Crooks, who fired off eight rounds, was the first shooting of a current or former president since 1981.

The close call on Mr. Trump’s life shocked the country and raised profound questions about whether the Secret Service was up to the task of protecting American leaders in the current, unusually high, threat environment.

Those concerns were underscored on Sunday when the Secret Service spotted a man with a firearm hiding in the wooded area of a golf course in Florida where Mr. Trump was playing a round. That episode, which ended with a Secret Service agent firing at the gunman, who sped off in a vehicle and was arrested 45 minutes later, appeared to be a second assassination attempt on Mr. Trump.

Mr. Rowe promised that the agency was already learning from the mistakes at the rally and making changes. The Secret Service’s summary findings were released after a monthslong inquiry. The complete report is not yet finished.

The review pointed to an array of shortcomings in the preparation and security of the July 13 event, including gaps in communication and a failure to follow through and address concerns about the unguarded warehouses that ultimately became a critical point of vulnerability. Those findings hewed closely to security lapses that were identified in a New York Times investigation.

The most glaring of the agency’s lapses that day centers on how Mr. Crooks was able to climb onto a roof of one warehouse, owned by AGR International, giving him a clear line of sight to Mr. Trump.

“Multiple law enforcement entities involved in securing the rally questioned” the location of a local team of snipers that had positioned itself in the warehouse area, but without a clear view of the rooftops, the report said. “Yet there was no follow-up discussion about modifying their position.”

Local law enforcement officials have said in interviews with The Times that Secret Service agents in charge of planning for the rally never specified where local officers should be, leaving them to make their own decisions.

Secret Service countersnipers deployed to the event based on heightened threats against Mr. Trump were assigned to assess the landscape and position themselves in strategic places to detect a would-be sniper at high points with a clear shot of Mr. Trump. But no one was posted on the rooftop from which Mr. Crooks eventually lay prone with his rifle.

“The Secret Service did not give clear guidance or direction to our local law enforcement partners,” Mr. Rowe said.

He added that the fact that the warehouses were left exposed was a topic of repeated conversation during the planning phase leading up to July 13. Mr. Rowe said that even as late as the day of the event, some agents were concerned about the risk posed by the unguarded warehouse roofs. But the agents never escalated their worries to supervisors who could have helped solve the problem in time to secure Mr. Trump’s safety.

“While some members of the advance team were very diligent, there was complacency on the part of others that led to a breach of security protocols,” Mr. Rowe said.

The summary findings also addressed the fact that two command posts were permitted to be set up, without key personnel being concentrated in the one where the Secret Service was posted. The findings also faulted an overreliance on mobile phones, rather than the use of a common radio frequency, for communications.

Mr. Rowe said agents surrounding Mr. Trump never received notice that a man was on the roof of the AGR building because the information was not shared over Secret Service radios.

Instead, a Secret Service agent called the agency’s countersniper to inform him. Had that information been shared over the Secret Service’s radio, the agents surrounding Mr. Trump would probably have had enough time to remove Mr. Trump from the podium before Mr. Crooks fired.

The dual command post would not have been a problem if all the agencies had been represented in the room with the Secret Service, Mr. Rowe said.

Compounding the problems was the fact that the Secret Service agents responsible for preparing the security plan could not get drone detection equipment provided by Mr. Trump’s personal Secret Service detail to work.

“It is possible that if this element of the advance had functioned properly, the shooter may have been detected as he flew his drone near the Butler Farm Show venue earlier in the day,” the summary said.

Still, Mr. Rowe’s comments and the summary report left some important questions unanswered. Neither said who, specifically, was responsible for ensuring that the warehouses were properly protected. And they did not explain why agents in the agency’s communications hub did not realize that they were not hearing from local police radios in the hours they were there before Mr. Trump took the podium.

Larry Berger, a lawyer for several of the agents placed on restricted duty, said individual agents could not be blamed for institutional deficiencies.

The review acknowledged that Secret Service agents are stretched particularly thin during election years and that the Butler rally was sandwiched between resource-heavy protection assignments, with a NATO summit in Washington coming just days before and the Republican National Convention just days afterward. Such events, the report explained, are some of the service’s “most staffing-intensive undertakings.”

Mr. Rowe’s willingness to accept responsibility for the mistakes — he began the news conference by saying that “this was a failure on the part of the United States Secret Service” — was praised by James Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police.

“I would basically commend the Secret Service for being very introspective about this,” Mr. Pasco said on Friday. He and other local law enforcement executives were frustrated that the Secret Service appeared to blame local law enforcement in the days and weeks after the rally.

“With respect to their relationship with state and local officers, that will always be strong,” Mr. Pasco said. “But what’s been highlighted here is the extraordinary need for mutually open and all-inclusive communication, before, during and after the fact.”

Mr. Rowe’s comments and actions on Friday still managed to prompt frustration in another camp: the members of Congress seeking to get to the bottom of what went wrong in Butler. Although the Secret Service briefed some lawmakers on its findings last week, it did not circulate its report widely to Congress before releasing it to the public.

“I am more than a little disturbed that we have received nothing from them,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairman of a subcommittee investigating the security failures at Butler. Later in the day, he received the report.

By a vote of 405 to 0, the House passed legislation on Friday intended to ensure that Mr. Trump receives the same level of Secret Service protection as President Biden — something the Secret Service has said is already happening.

The legislation, sponsored by Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, would require the Secret Service to “apply the same standards for determining the number of agents required to protect presidents, vice presidents and major presidential and vice-presidential candidates.”

The Secret Service said it was already providing the highest level of protection for Mr. Trump after Mr. Biden ordered enhanced security. But Mr. Lawler said the enhanced security was provided only after an attempt on the former president’s life.

“It shouldn’t have come to that, which is all the more reason why this bill is necessary,” Mr. Lawler said.

Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.