An independent, bipartisan review identified “numerous mistakes”by the Secret Service and “specific failures and breakdowns” that enabled the assassination attempt that injured former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
The panel, made up of four former senior law enforcement and government officials, also warned ofanother catastrophic security lapseif the Secret Service does not immediately undertake “fundamental reform.”
“The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static,”the panel wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who overseesthe organization.
“The Secret Service as an agency requires fundamental reform to carry out its mission," the members added. "Without that reform, the Independent Review Panel believes another Butler can and will happen again.”
In an interview with NBC News, acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said he was still processing the review but has already begun reforming the agency.
"We have not been sitting back waiting for reports like this to come out," Rowe said. "Following the horrific events of July 13, we’ve already started to make not only operational changes, but policy changes, and to ensure that we don’t have another mission failure like July 13."
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Rowe acknowledged that his agents are being stretched to the limits.
"We are redlining our people. We are asking them to do extraordinary things right now," he said. "They’re spending long hours at work, away from their families, but they are meeting this moment right now, and so I’m pushing myself to make sure that I’m advocating for them."
The panel conducted 58 multihour interviews of individuals from the Secret Service, federal, state and local law enforcement, and reviewed more than 7,000 documents,according to its report. The panel members and staffalsotraveled to Butler where they surveyedthe site of the assassination attempt.
The group said it identified “deep flaws in the Secret Service, including some that appear to be systemic or cultural,” including a “lack of critical thinking among Secret Service personnel” and agents’unwillingness to“speak up”regarding potential threats.
Long list of failures
The new report reflects much of what was previously reported about the Secret Service’s failures before and during the July 13rally. No personnel from the Secret Service or any other federal, state or local law enforcement agency, for example, were specifically tasked with securing the roof of the building from which the gunman fired at Trump.
Mitigating the line of sight from the building to the stage with physical barriers if needed should have been a standard operating procedure for the Secret Service and “represents a critical security failure," the review said.
Trump’s Secret Service detail did additional advance work prior to the rally, including a countersniper advance, specifically because the leader and assistant leader of Trump’s personal detail had been read in on intelligence “related to a long-range threat against former President Trump by a foreign actor, though not specific to the Butler rally.
The Trump campaign later said that Trump had been briefed by U.S. intelligence officials on “real and specific threats” from Iran to assassinate him.
Thomas Matthew Crooks’ "method of attempted assassination embodied the very sort of threat which the intelligence warned against” the report concluded.
In a footnote, the report notes that “the panel has encountered some evidence that Trump Campaign staff expressed resistance regarding the placement of certain heavy equipment and/or vehicles at the site,” which could have been used to mitigate the line of sight risk.
The report said it was ultimately the responsibility of the Secret Service to ensure appropriate mitigations are in place and “escalate areas of difference between campaign staff and the service to their proper resolution.”
Two hours before the assassination attempt, Crooks was able to operate a drone at the rally site at 3:51 p.m. for approximately 11 minutes. His drone went undetected because the Secret Service’s system to counter drones had a technical issue and was inoperative for many hours.In the end,the system didnotstart working more than a half-hour after Crooks used the drone.
The report also describesthe failure of Secret Service or local law enforcement officialsto findCrooks, despite him being first identified as suspicious more than 90 minutes before he opened fire on Trump.
Crooks was first identified by a local countersniper team member about to go off duty. He sent a text to other countersnipers warning that Crooks had snuck into a parking lot that was intended to be off limits and had been blocked off by physical barriers.
Most importantly, the leadership of Trump’s Secret Service detail was never informed of a person acting suspiciously in the crowd before the former president took the stage, or in the minutes after Crooks had positioned himself on the roof of the building and was preparing to shoot.
It was only at 6:09 p.m., four minutes after Trump began to speak, that a Pennsylvania state trooper stationed with the Secret Service in the security room conveyed verbally that Crooks was the suspicious individual who had been ranging the stage and was now on the roof of a building.
The Secret Service’s security room did not have a direct view of the rally stage and “did not have an operating Incident Command System for the centralized reporting and tracking of events and issues that arose.”
The panel recommended a series of reforms to be implemented by the Secret Service as soon as possible, such as overhead surveillance for outdoor events, additional training and the establishment of central communications hub for large events. The panel also recommended that all participating law enforcement agencies be included.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the panel did not find a lack of funding to be an underlying factor in the failures of the Secret Service. The agency’sbudget almost doubled over the last decade, jumping from around $1.8 billion in fiscal 2014 to more than $3 billion, according to government filings.
During the same period, agencywide staffing rose by almost 25%, with more than 8,100 personnel. They include roughly 3,200 special agents and 1,300 uniformed officers, according tothe agency’s website.
The report concludes that the agency’s failures go beyond spending. “Even an unlimited budget would not, by itself, remediate many of the failures of July 13,” it said.
Sarah Fitzpatrick is a senior investigative producer and story editor for NBC News. She previously worked for CBS News and "60 Minutes."
Julia Ainsley
Julia Ainsley is the homeland security correspondent for NBC News and covers the Department of Homeland Security for the NBC News Investigative Unit.