Communication Failures Plagued Deadly Trump Rally, Secret Service Finds

The summary of an internal investigation determined that the agency did not adequately prepare its local partners for their duties at the event in Butler, Pa., in July.

A Secret Service internal review of the failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump at a July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., found that agents did not have the necessary discussions about how a complex of warehouses surrounding the site should be protected.

The most glaring of the agency’s security lapses on that day centers on how an armed 20-year-old was able to climb onto a roof of one of the warehouses, giving him a clear line of sight to Mr. Trump. Other failures noted in the agency’s summary include the inability of the Secret Service to talk with its local partners over radios and technical challenges that prevented agents from launching drone detection on the day of the rally.

The Secret Service’s findings were released in a brief summary of its monthslong inquiry on Friday. The complete report is not yet finished.

The abbreviated findings left some major questions unanswered, including: Who in the Secret Service was responsible for ensuring that the warehouses were properly protected on the day of the event? And why didn’t any agents in the agency’s communications hub realize that they were not hearing from local police radios in the hours they were there before Mr. Trump took the podium?

“It’s important that we hold ourselves to account for the failures of July 13 and that we use the lessons learned to make sure that we do not have another mission failure like this again,” the agency’s acting director, Ronald L. Rowe Jr., said in a statement before a news conference on Friday afternoon.

Read the Summary of the Secret Service’s Internal Review

The agency released a brief summary of its monthslong inquiry into the failures leading to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July. The complete report is not yet finished.

Read Document 5 pages

The attempted assassination of Mr. Trump in July — made by a man named Thomas Crooks who fired off eight rounds — was the first instance of a current or former president being shot since 1981. Mr. Crooks was able to graze Mr. Trump’s ear before being killed by a Secret Service countersniper’s bullet. Three rally attendees were also shot, one fatally.

The close call on Mr. Trump’s life shocked the country and raised profound questions about whether the Secret Service was up to the task of protecting American leaders in the current, unusually high, threat environment.

Those concerns were underscored on Sunday when the Secret Service spotted a man with a firearm hiding in the wooded area of a golf course in Florida where Mr. Trump was playing a round. That episode, which ended with a Secret Service agent firing shots at the gunman, who sped off in a vehicle and was arrested 45 minutes later, appeared to be a second assassination attempt on Mr. Trump.

The internal review issued on Friday pointed to an array of shortcomings in the preparation and security of the July 13 event, including failures of communication, failures of technology and a failure to follow through and address concerns about the unguarded warehouses that ultimately became a critical point of vulnerability. Those findings hewed closely to security lapses that were identified in a New York Times investigation published on Wednesday.

“Multiple law enforcement entities involved in securing the rally questioned” the location of a local team of snipers that had positioned itself in the warehouse area, but without a clear view of the rooftops, the report stated. “Yet there was no follow-up discussion about modifying their position,” it said.

Local law enforcement officials have said in interviews with The Times that Secret Service agents who were charged with planning for the rally never specified where they should be located, leaving them to make their own decisions. Secret Service countersnipers who were deployed to the event based on heightened threats against Mr. Trump were tasked with assessing the landscape and positioning themselves in strategic places to detect a would-be sniper at high points with a clear shot of Mr. Trump. But no one was posted on the rooftop from which Mr. Crooks eventually lay prone with his rifle.

The presence of two command posts rather than one, and the fact that the Secret Service and local law enforcement were operating on two different radio frequencies, was also problematic, the report found.

Some local police teams, the report said, “had no knowledge that there were two separate communications centers on site” and as a result were “operating under a misimpression that the Secret Service was directly receiving their radio transmissions.”

But it is not clear which local agencies the Secret Service is referring to. The Times interviewed several local officials who knew of the separate command centers and said they were not invited to the Secret Service’s security room, which would have resolved the issue of different radio frequencies.

Compounding the problems was the fact that the Secret Service agents responsible for preparing the security plan for the rally were unable to get drone detection equipment provided by Mr. Trump’s personal Secret Service detail to work.

“It is possible that if this element of the advance had functioned properly, the shooter may have been detected as he flew his drone near the Butler Farm Show venue earlier in the day,” the summary said.

The review also acknowledged that Secret Service agents are stretched particularly thin during election years and that the Butler rally was sandwiched between major resource-heavy protection assignments with a NATO summit in Washington and the Republican National Convention coming just days before and after Mr. Trump’s campaign event in Butler. Such events, the report explained, are some of the service’s “most staffing-intensive undertakings.”

The agency placed five agents on restricted duty in response to the July 13 shooting. The Butler fiasco also led to the abrupt resignation of the service’s director at the time, Kimberly A. Cheatle.

Congress was quick to call hearings in July, and many lawmakers have made several trips to Butler to review the site and interview local law enforcement. In addition to the Secret Service’s investigation, the Homeland Security Department convened an outside panel to review what happened on July 13. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is also conducting an investigation, as are the F.B.I. and the Pennsylvania State Police.