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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