DHS watchdog finds Secret Service missed repeated chances to stop Butler assassination attempt

The U.S. Secret Service missed 102 radio transmissions warning that a gunman had been spotted, including alerts that a suspect was on a rooftop with a long gun, before Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on Donald Trump at a July 13, 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. That finding sits at the center of a 64-page report released by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, which concluded that the agency's failures "set the conditions" for the near-fatal attack.

Crooks fired eight shots. Trump was grazed in the ear. Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old retired volunteer fire chief, was killed. Two other spectators were critically injured but survived.

The OIG report does not describe a single point of failure. It describes a cascade of them, broken communications, malfunctioning equipment, ignored vulnerabilities, and a security perimeter that left a known line-of-sight threat completely unguarded. For anyone who watched the chaos unfold that Saturday afternoon and wondered how it could have happened, the inspector general's answer is blunt: the Secret Service let it happen through systemic negligence.

102 missed warnings, 257 yards apart

The most damning detail may be the simplest. Secret Service personnel and local law enforcement operated out of separate command posts located 257 yards apart. Their radio connectivity was intermittent and "highly limited," the report found. Local officers transmitted 102 radio messages about an increasingly urgent search for a suspicious individual, Crooks, including direct warnings that the suspect had climbed onto a roof with a long gun.

The Secret Service missed all of them.

That gap was not a surprise glitch. The two agencies were running parallel operations with no reliable way to talk to each other. Former Secret Service agent Paul Eckloff, speaking to Fox News Digital, identified the problem plainly:

"Communications was a problem because of inoperability. There were too many command posts. The biggest failure that is probably not addressed in the OIG report is that they never should have accepted the risk of doing it at this site. It never should have been done. That roof had an egregious line of site."

Eckloff's point about the site itself cuts deeper than any single equipment failure. The AGR, American Glass Research International, building complex near the Butler Farm Show grounds had been flagged during advance walkthroughs as a line-of-sight vulnerability. Secret Service agents knew Crooks' eventual firing position offered a direct view of Trump's podium from just 155 yards away.

The truck fix that never happened

Knowing the AGR complex posed a threat, officials proposed a low-tech solution: use trucks already on site to block the view from the building to the stage. Trump's campaign staff rejected the idea because the trucks would interfere with press photographs.

An agent then proposed moving the trucks to a secondary location that would still obstruct the sightline. But the agent never verified whether the campaign staff actually repositioned the equipment. The OIG report does not say the trucks were moved. Crooks had an unobstructed view of Trump's podium.

The sequence is worth pausing on. The vulnerability was identified. A fix was proposed. The fix was rejected for cosmetic reasons. A workaround was suggested. Nobody followed up. A man with a rifle exploited exactly the gap everyone had already seen.

The Secret Service's job is not to defer to press aesthetics. Its job is to keep the protectee alive. The report makes clear the agency failed to ensure the known vulnerability was addressed, regardless of who objected to the original plan.

A drone flew undetected for nine minutes

Less than three hours before the rally, Crooks flew a drone for almost nine minutes. The aircraft operated 471 yards from the event stage at an altitude of 102 feet. The Secret Service's counter-drone system, which was supposed to detect exactly this kind of activity, was not operational at the time due to a malfunction. The operator assigned to the system was also described in the report as under-trained.

So the agency had counter-drone technology on site, but the equipment did not work and the person running it was not adequately prepared. Crooks conducted aerial surveillance of the rally grounds in broad daylight, and no one noticed.

Recent incidents have only reinforced how persistent the threat environment around senior officials remains. A shooting near Vice President Vance's motorcade in Washington involved an armed felon walking the vice president's route, raising separate but related questions about protective security.

Intelligence that stayed in a silo

The OIG report also found that the Secret Service failed to share intelligence about a long-distance threat to Trump with its own Pittsburgh field office or with agents working the Butler event. The report does not detail the precise nature of the threat information. But the finding means that agents on the ground, the people physically responsible for keeping Trump safe, were operating without intelligence their own agency possessed.

This is not a resource problem. It is an institutional one. Eckloff acknowledged the limits of manpower but framed the core issue differently:

"There should have been a better advance, more officers, more agents, but there's simply a limit to that."

The limit he described is real. But the OIG report suggests the failures at Butler were not about having too few people. They were about the people who were there not communicating, not following through, and not treating known risks as actionable.

A pattern of security gaps around protected officials

The Butler failures did not occur in isolation. In the months since, security incidents involving senior officials have continued to surface. Trump himself accepted an invitation to the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Dinner after an April assassination attempt disrupted the original event, an episode that drew its own scrutiny over how a gunman got close enough to fire.

The suspect in that shooting, Cole Allen, has since argued in court that he should be released despite facing attempted assassination charges, a claim that has drawn sharp criticism.

Meanwhile, Acting Attorney General Blanche has pointed to a separate shooting near the White House as justification for expanded security infrastructure, an acknowledgment, at least implicitly, that existing protections have proven inadequate.

What the report recommends

The inspector general's office laid out three categories of reform: mandatory threat communication protocols so that intelligence does not sit unused in one office while agents in the field operate without it; enhanced counter-drone training to ensure operators can actually run the equipment they are assigned; and a formal process to document the identification and blocking of line-of-sight vulnerabilities, so that a known danger like the AGR building cannot simply fall through the cracks because no one checked whether the trucks got moved.

These are not exotic recommendations. They are basic operational standards that any competent protective detail should already have in place. The fact that a 64-page federal report had to spell them out tells you how far the agency's practices had drifted from its mission.

Fox News Digital reported reaching out to both the Secret Service and the White House for comment on the OIG findings. Neither response was included in the reporting.

The judicial system's handling of those who have targeted Trump has drawn its own controversy. A federal judge apologized to an accused Trump assassin over jail conditions, prompting a sharp rebuke from former judge Jeanine Pirro, a reminder that accountability gaps extend well beyond the Secret Service.

The bottom line from Butler

The DHS inspector general's language was measured but its conclusions were not ambiguous. The report stated that the Secret Service's "overall lack of policy and processes coupled with limited intelligence sharing and poor collaboration and communication with protectee staff and state and local law enforcement set the conditions that led to missing opportunities to prevent and detect the attempted assassination."

"Set the conditions." That phrase does a lot of work. It means the agency did not just fail to stop Crooks. It created the environment in which Crooks could succeed. A man with a range finder, a rifle, and a consumer drone exploited gaps the Secret Service already knew about, using tools the Secret Service already had the means to detect, from a position the Secret Service had already identified as dangerous.

Corey Comperatore is dead. Two other Americans nearly died. The former and now current president came within inches of assassination. And the agency charged with preventing exactly that outcome missed 102 warnings.

When the people responsible for protecting the president need a 64-page report to learn they should answer the radio, the problem is not a staffing shortfall. It is an institution that lost its way.