The attempted assassination of Trump: the secret service missed 102 reports about the suspect

The Secret Service in the United States missed 102 reports on the identity of the shooter at Trump’s July 2024 election rally in Pennsylvania, according to the report of the inspector general of the US Department of Homeland Security published last night (Thursday). This was due to the lack of success in establishing a joint communications room with local law enforcement in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“Instead, we found that the Secret Service received only five phone calls and three messages about the shooter,” the report said. In fact, as a result the servicemen did not alert Trump’s security unit about a “suspicious person”. Thomas Crooks, later identified as the shooter, opened fire from a rooftop when he reached a direct line of sight to Trump during his speech. He was shot dead by the authorities already in real time.

Another omission was revealed following the report, according to which Crooks flew a drone over the area hours before he carried out the shooting – and the Secret Service’s drone detection system failed to locate him. According to the inspector general, it was manned by a single “untrained” operator, during which time Crooks flew the drone for nearly nine minutes – without being detected.

The recommendations of the report concern the areas of information sharing and “vulnerability in the line of sight” before such events. The Secret Service accepted the Inspector General’s recommendations and added that many of them had already been identified and implemented. Kimberly Cheatle, who was then the head of the Secret Service in the United States, announced her resignation shortly after the assassination attempt while admitting that it was the “biggest operational failure of the service in decades”.

The assassination attempt on Trump at the election rally was the first of three that happened in a relatively short period of time, before and after his re-election as president. The second attempt happened in September 2024, outside the golf club where he was staying in Florida. An armed assassin came within a few hundred feet of Trump, and that fact has reignited criticism of the Secret Service.

The third assassination attempt happened last April in Washington, during a gala event for White House reporters at the Hilton Hotel. So, when gunshots were heard outside the hall, about 20 Secret Service agents burst into the scene – and wanted to evacuate the president, first lady Melania Trump and the vice president from the stage. President Trump was inside the hall, when the same man, armed with a shotgun, positioned himself in the area of ​​the magnetometers outside the hall, only about 15 meters from the entrance.