WASHINGTON — Members of a bipartisan House task force investigating Trump’s assassination attempts insisted Thursday at their first hearing that the Secret Service, not local authorities, was responsible for the planning failures and communications that allowed a gunman to open fire on former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
Lawmakers repeatedly asked why the body responsible for protection The country’s top leaders did not do a better job of communicating with local authorities during the July 13 rally, especially when it came to securing the building that was widely believed to be a security threat but which ultimately left so unprotected that gunman Thomas Michael Crooks was able to climb up and open fire on Trump.
“In the days leading up to the meeting, it was no single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our nation’s most elite group of security professionals. There were security concerns on multiple fronts,” said the committee’s Republican co-chair, Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.
“Communications between the Secret Service and local and state partners have been disjointed and unclear,” said Rep. Jason Crow, the top Democrat on the panel, who also praised local law enforcement.
Trump was injured and a man who attended the rally with his family was killed.
The panel — made up of seven Republicans and six Democrats — has spent the past two months analyzing security lapses at the meeting, conducting nearly two dozen interviews with law enforcement officials and receiving more than 2,800 pages of documents from the Secret Service.
Lawmakers are also investigating a second assassination attempt on Trump that took place earlier this month, involving a man wanted with a gun kill the GOP presidential candidate while golfing at one of his South Florida courses.
But Thursday’s hearing focused on the shooting with testimony from police officials from Pennsylvania and Butler County.
The Secret Service often relies on local authorities to secure larger events where protectors like Trump appear across the country. But after the Butler meeting, the agency was heavily criticized for not clearly communicating what it needed from those local agencies that day.
A key question was why there were no law enforcement personnel at the top of the AGR building where Crooks eventually climbed up and took his photos, since it was so close to the rally stage and afforded Trump a clear line of sight.
“A 10-year-old looking at that satellite image could have seen that the biggest threat to the president that day” was the building near the stage, said Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas.
Edward Lenz, commander of the Butler County Emergency Services Unit who was in charge of the local tactical units that operated during the Butler rally, said his agency was never asked to put a sniper team on the roof and that he would never do. Lenz said the Secret Service knew their shooters were inside the AGR building — a position designed to allow them to look for threats within the rally crowd, as opposed to threats against the president from outside — and that there was no “feedback or guidance” from the Secret Service. Service that they wanted the team somewhere else.
“They knew where we would be,” Lenz said. “They knew what our plan was.”
Lenz also testified that Secret Service officials did not check with him or his team about their presence before Trump took the stage, and that emergency communications for July 13 had not been worked out in advance.
Drew Blasko, an assistant sniper unit team leader within the Butler Township Emergency Services Unit, testified that he shared his concerns about the building with the Secret Service before the meeting, saying his team did not have the manpower to post anyone there . . He said he asked the Secret Service to put additional people there and was told “they would take care of it.”
Some witnesses also said there had been discussions beforehand about using opaque screens or large farm equipment to block the line of sight to the stage, but it is not clear what happened to those suggestions.
Another problem lawmakers highlighted was the difficulty for different agencies to talk to each other over radios or cell phones. And they wondered why there were two command posts, instead of one unified post where the Secret Service could have communicated directly with all state and local authorities.
Patrick Sullivan, a retired Secret Service agent who was not involved in the Butler meeting but attended the hearing as an expert on the agency’s practices and procedures, said it was not a typical setup. “There should be only one general command post,” he said.
Lawmakers struggled during their questioning Thursday to get witnesses to focus on a single individual or moment that led to the assassination attempt. Local police officials and a retired Secret Service agent who also testified instead pointed to a series of incidents and mistakes that ultimately allowed Crooks to remain fearless for an extended period of time and ultimately take his shot at the former president.
“There was a complete lack of communication here,” said Rep. Correa, a California Democrat. “What went wrong? Who’s in charge?”
Thursday’s session was the fourth congressional hearing on the Butler shooting since July. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned a day after her appeared before a congressional hearing, where she was berated for hours by both Democrats and Republicans over the agency’s security shortcomings.
Cheatle called the Pennsylvania attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades, but she angered lawmakers by not answering specific questions about the investigation.
A interim report On Wednesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is also conducting an investigation, said the Secret Service did not provide clear instructions on how state and local officials should cover the building where the gunman ultimately took up position. The report also states that the agency did not ensure it could share information with local partners in real time.
The Secret Service also released a five-page document summarizing key conclusions from an as-yet-unfinished agency investigation report about what went wrong in Butler. Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe has said the agency is ultimately responsible for what happened. He has cited complacency among agency staff and said they need to communicate better with local and state officials.
The House of Representatives panel is expected to propose a series of legal reforms and issue a final report before December 13.
While the surveillance investigations were bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans were disagreed on whether to give the Secret Service more money in the aftermath of his failures. A government financing bill passed Wednesday includes, among other things another $231 million for the agency, even as many Republicans were skeptical and said an internal review of the Secret Service is needed.