by Steven Richards
Congress has not given up its push to find answers about the near-miss assassination attempt against President Donald Trump.
ust past the dark one-year anniversary of the first
assassination attempt against then-candidate Donald Trump in Butler,
Pennsylvania, the American people know more than ever about the security
failures leading up to the incident that were uncovered by
congressional and federal watchdog probes.
However, several important questions remain unanswered
about what transpired that day, Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., whose
committee is leading a probe into the incident, told Just the News. Chief among the unknowns: the would-be assassin’s motivation.
Sen. Johnson said an important next step would be for law
enforcement to release video footage and other evidence, including FBI
investigation documents, related to the assassination attempt to provide
more transparency to the American public.
“We requested their notes, the 302s on those FBI
interviews. We'd like to see the body cam video. We'd like to see the
cameras from cars, you know—we want to see all that evidence,” Johnson told the Just the News, No Noise TV show this week. “The American people have a right to see this.”
Sen. Johnson spearheaded an early Senate investigation into
the assassination attempt at a Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally.
July 13 marked the one-year anniversary of that attempt, in which Thomas
Crooks scaled a building overlooking a Trump rally while the former
president was speaking and fired multiple shots into the crowd, injuring
the former president and killing Buffalo Township fire chief Corey Comperatore, who was an attendee.
Subpoenas issued for transparency's sake
Just days before the anniversary, Sen. Johnson issued new subpoenas
to the Justice Department and FBI for security camera footage related
to Crooks, any forensic reports on the assassination attempt, and
records about the suspect from any law enforcement investigations.
Johnson said he approved the subpoenas to elicit more
information after facing stonewalling from both agencies since the
incident. However, the senator said the subpoenas should not be viewed
as hostile and that he wants to work cooperatively with the new Trump
administration officials to complete his investigation.
“I view this as a friendly subpoena, not an adversarial
one, just to prompt transparency,” Johnson said. “We… uncovered an awful
lot just talking to local law enforcement in the week or two
afterwards, but then local law enforcement clammed up, probably under
the direction of the FBI.”
Johnson said that though his staff was able to conduct a
“couple dozen” interviews with the Secret Service, the FBI has records
of “hundreds” of interviews taken in the aftermath of the incident that
could contain information pertinent to his investigation.
Trump FBI Director Kash Patel promised in May
that the bureau would be fully transparent about its investigation into
Crooks’ assassination attempt. "[Y]ou're going to know everything we
know," Patel told Fox News’ Bret Baier.
Murder attempt was preventable
But while the would-be assassin Thomas Crooks’ motivations
and the results of the FBI’s investigation into Crooks remain relatively
unknown, multiple congressional investigations have uncovered
significant details about Secret Service failures that paint the picture
of an agency plagued by communication problems, lack of clear policies
for protecting VIPs, and an unwillingness to hold leaders accountable
for failures.
A bipartisan House task force investigation into the Butler assassination attempt, as well as a second attempt in Florida, concluded in its December 2024 final report that “the tragic and shocking events in Butler, Pennsylvania were preventable and should not have happened.”
The panel blamed a combination of failures in “planning,
execution, and leadership” leading up to and during the July 13 rally
that exposed the former president to danger and “undermined the
effectiveness of the human and material assets deployed that day.”
The task force identified several decision points that contributed to the overall failure.
“Foremost, the failure to secure a recognized high-risk
area immediately adjacent to the venue… gave rise to several
vulnerabilities that eventually allowed Crooks to evade law enforcement,
climb on and traverse the roof of the AGR complex, and open fire,” the
lawmakers concluded.
The failure by the Secret Service to secure the grounds of
the building Crooks ultimately scaled and used as a vantage point to
fire on Trump, as well as the decision to allow unvetted crowds to
gather on that property to watch the rally, made the would-be assassin
“more difficult to interdict” as he exhibited suspicious behavior, the
lawmakers also said.
The lawmakers also determined that the Secret Service
failed to provide proper guidance and instructions to local law
enforcement partners about which entity was responsible for the area and
failed to address concerns about inadequate personnel to cover the
event.
An earlier report by Sen. Johnson’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee came to similar conclusions,
finding “USSS failures in planning, communications, security, and
allocation of resources for the July 13, 2024 Butler rally were
foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting
in the assassination attempt that day.”
“The Committee also finds that siloed communications and
coordination problems between federal, state, and local law enforcement
officials remain unaddressed and were a contributing factor to the
failures at the July 13 Butler rally,” the committee concluded.
The latest review of the incident from the Government
Accountability Office, a copy of which was released last week by Sen.
Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who commissioned the report, found the Secret
Service “failed to implement security measures that could have prevented
the assassination attempt” on then-former President Trump.
Most strikingly, the investigation found that the Secret
Service had received threat intelligence 10 days before the attempt
about a threat to then-candidate Trump’s life.
“Prior to the July 13 rally, senior-level Secret Service
officials became aware of a threat to then-former President Trump,” GAO
concluded. “This information was not specific to the July 13 rally or
gunman. Nonetheless, due to the Secret Service’s siloed practice for
sharing classified threat information, Secret Service and local law
enforcement personnel central to developing site security plans for the
rally were unaware of the threat.”
Agents suspended, but no supervisors disciplined
Despite the myriad communications and process failures
identified by the multiple probes, the Secret Service has yet to fully
remedy the issues and has not terminated any agents or supervisors for
their missteps.
Deputy Secret Service Director Matt Quinn revealed recently
that the agency suspended at least six agents without pay in the
aftermath of the assassination attempt, but none were fired, Just the News reported earlier this month.
However, even among the suspended agents, none were the
supervisors responsible for reviewing their subordinates’ security plans
for the rally, Susan Crabtree of RealClear Politics reported. According to Crabtree, key supervisors who signed off on the security plan were not only passed over for disciplinary action, but received promotions from new Secret Service Director Sean Curran.
One of the supervisors, Nick Menster was reassigned as
second agent in charge of Lara and Eric Trump's protective detail.
Another, Nick Olszewski, was assigned as the chief of the Inspection
Division, tasked with ensuring accountability.
Quinn said that the Secret Service is “laser-focused” on
addressing the “root cause” of the failures and defended the agency’s
decision not to fire any personnel.
"We aren't going to fire our way out of this. We're going
to focus on the root cause and fix the deficiencies that put us in that
situation,” he said. "Secret Service is totally accountable for Butler. Butler was an operational failure, and we are focused today on ensuring that it never happens again."
Steven Richards
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/one-year-after-butler-secret-service-failures-revealed-assassins
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