A would-be assassin’s attempt on President-elect Donald Trump’s life at a Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally was enabled by “preexisting conditions and leadership failures” within the U.S. Secret Service, a House task force has found.
The panel was tasked with investigating the July 13 shooting and a second assassination attempt against Trump that took place on Sept. 15 at his West Palm Beach golf club in Florida.
While the task force said it received enough intel to conclude that the first incident was “preventable,” lawmakers noted in their final report that several federal law enforcement agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Secret Service failed to produce requested documents relevant to their inquiry.
The Department of Justice, FBI, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) “provided limited cooperation in certain areas of the Task Force’s investigation,” states the report, which the panel released on Dec. 10.
Lawmakers noted that the FBI never provided them with a comprehensive log of evidence or made critical witnesses available for testimony concerning the July shooting. The bureau also declined to respond to repeated requests for digital analyses of the deceased shooter’s devices.
The ATF, meanwhile, was unhelpful with the inquiry, lawmakers said, aside from making two subpoenaed employees available for testimony at the last minute.
“ATF also refused repeated requests for document production and only after previously noted subpoenas were issued did it make a production of only 40 pages available to the Task Force,” the report states. “This represented only a small fraction of the information sought by the Task Force.”
Other outstanding requests include documents and communications concerning the FBI’s identification of the shooter and the cleaning of the crime scene, and all intelligence concerning the threats Trump was facing around the dates he was targeted, among others.
‘Critical Vulnerabilities’
Regarding the Sept. 15 incident, the panel found that the golf course’s security was impaired by “critical vulnerabilities” that were known to Secret Service and media photographers alike. According to the report, the Secret Service had previously identified the spot along the course’s perimeter where suspect Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly positioned himself as “a favorable position for potential snipers.”Nonetheless, the task force concluded that events that transpired that day showed “how properly executed protective measures can foil an attempted assassination.”
A Secret Service agent sweeping the course spotted the barrel of a rifle poking through the foliage and fired in that direction, sending the suspect running.
“The special agent’s quick response and decision to discharge his firearm in the direction of the threat prevented a potentially lethal or other dangerous scenario from occurring,” the task force determined.
In their final report, lawmakers issued a series of recommendations to prevent such failures from occurring again. Those suggestions included implementing counter-surveillance at all outdoor events, sharing threat intelligence with the relevant authorities, reviewing agency protocols for sweeping golf courses, and reducing the number of Secret Service protectees, among others.
