Investigation finds Secret Service communications broke down before Trump was shot | Shooting at Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania

An internal Secret Service investigation has confirmed that there were numerous serious communications breakdowns prior to the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing anonymous officials, that the former president's security detail failed to instruct local police to secure the roof of the building used by the shooter.

The Secret Service had considered placing heavy equipment and flags between the stage and where Thomas Matthew Crooks would later sit.
on a glass factory 300 feet away to block the clear view from the roof.

But supervisors who arrived for the rally in Butler found that the cranes, trucks and flags were not positioned in a way that obstructed the view.

Crook later managed to climb onto the roof and fire a rifle seven times, killing one bystander, wounding Trump in the ear and injuring two others before being shot and killed by Secret Service snipers.

The internal investigation, known as the Mission Assurance Investigation, found that the Secret Service — unlike the security forces that guard a sitting president and vice president and receive military support — uses a command post separate from local police to protect political figures who are not in office.

But in Butler, Trump's security personnel had no way to communicate with the local police guarding the fairgrounds.

The stunning lack of communication meant that Crooks was able to get to the roof, despite reports of a suspicious person with a rangefinder coming in an hour before Trump's speech that were not passed on to the Secret Service. It was only rally attendees who alerted local police to a man crawling across the roof “like a bear” before firing shots at the former president, one of which struck Trump's ear.

Instead, local snipers were instructed to text a photo of Crooks to a single Secret Service agent. The agents never heard back from local police trying to track him down over the radio. Butler County police also reportedly warned the Secret Service that they could not station a patrol car next to the building, but received no further instructions.

Kimberly Cheatle resigned as agency director days after the shooting after saying the roof pitch was too steep for agents. The agency's acting director, Ronald Rowe, said in a statement to the news agency: “The Secret Service cannot operate under the paradox of a 'zero-error mission' while simultaneously having our special agents and uniformed division officers execute a very critical national security mission by doing more with less.”

The report also found that the Secret Service had been slow to strengthen Trump's security measures, even after receiving reports of an Iranian plot to assassinate political candidates. Rowe later testified before Congress in July that he was “embarrassed” by the security lapses and vowed to reform the agency's practices. Two separate congressional investigations are also looking into security lapses.

The Trump campaign has said it has sometimes been forced to cancel or postpone events because of concerns about security measures. Trump's aides had been asking for more security measures for years. Both the first lady, Jill Biden, and the vice president, Kamala Harris, were in Pennsylvania that day, supporting the claim that the Secret Service is overwhelmed.

“I think the American people are going to be shocked, astonished and appalled by what we are going to tell them about the failures of the Secret Service in this assassination attempt on the former president,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal told Fox News after being briefed on the internal investigation.