A series of failures by the U.S. Secret Service allowed would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks to successfully land a shot in Donald Trump’s right ear, a new report has revealed.
A report from the bipartisan Use Senate investigation revealed how technical issues affected Secret Service drones during the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The agent responsible for overseeing the Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) called a toll-free 888 tech support hotline ‘to start troubleshooting with the company.’
There were no backup drones as of when the other faulty drones stopped flying.
It then took several hours to get the drones back up and running and the agent responsible for the drone operations only had three months of experience with the equipment.
The report released on Wednesday, September 25 concluded that the failures ahead of the rally were ‘foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt that day.’
The 20-year-old, now-deceased shooter was able to hit Trump in his ear, kill one rally attendee and critically injured two others before a counter-sniper took him out.
Crooks was on top of a nearby building a few hundred feet from where Trump was speaking that day, crouched down with an AR-15 rifle. He was able to fire eight rounds in Trump’s direction less than 150 yards from where the former president was speaking.
Due to the two failed assassination attempts on Trump, the US Congress is now considering more funds for the USSS to bolster staffing and counterattack measures.
But the Senate report also found that with additional resources, the Secret Service engaged in other questionable actions that led to security failures at the rally that day.
‘The consequences of those failures were dire,’ said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the Democratic chairman of the Homeland panel.
Investigators found that there was no clear chain of command among the Secret Service and other security agencies and no plan for coverage of the building where the shooter climbed up to fire the shots.
Officials were operating on multiple, separate radio channels, leading to missed communications, and an inexperienced drone operator was stuck on a helpline after his equipment wasn’t working correctly.