3 key findings on the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pa.

The congressional task force investigating two assassination attempts against then-candidate (now President-elect) Donald Trump issued its final report this week. The document scrutinizes the factors that led to a deadly shooting at a Trump campaign rally in July 2024 that almost cost Trump his life. 

The task force was led by Pennsylvania U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, and also included other members of the commonwealth’s congressional delegation, including U.S. Reps. Madeleine Dean and Chrissy Houlahan. 

The report outlines a range of factors and failures that led to the July 13 shooting, which resulted in the death of a rally attendee and saw Trump get grazed by a bullet. Among the concerns listed in the report, the task force found that law enforcement officials failed to secure the building on which Thomas Crooks, the shooter, had stationed himself. Congressional investigators also expressed concerns with law enforcement communications on the day of the campaign event, the lack of Secret Service manpower and the failure of law enforcement to block clear lines of sight to Trump from outside the rally’s perimeter. 

Below, our sister publication City & State examines three major findings from the report and recommendations made by the task force. 

Law enforcement failed to secure the American Glass Research complex

Crooks shot at Trump from atop an American Glass Research building, which fell outside of the rally’s secure perimeter established by the U.S. Secret Service. Because the AGR complex had a double fence line that separated it from the side of the rally, “the Secret Service considered the complex to be outside the secure perimeter,” according to the panel’s report. 

The report states that the Secret Service deferred to state and local law enforcement officials to cover the AGR building and the area around it. “However, due to the Secret Service’s failure to confirm with their state and local counterparts that the AGR complex would, in fact, be secured with assets assigned to guard the area, there were no patrol members of federal, state, or local agencies monitoring the AGR complex from which Crooks fired on July 13,” the report reads. 

The panel concluded that neither state nor local law enforcement agencies posted vehicles or officers in the AGR complex’s parking lot, and that no officers were responsible for preventing passersby from entering the property.

The task force issued two recommendations to prevent similar incidents from happening again, writing that the Secret Service should review and consolidate all law enforcement operations plans in the future. “Moving forward, the Secret Service should request copies of the operations plans of all law enforcement entities working the event and consolidate the assigned posts for each participating entity,” the report continued. “For the July 13th event in Butler, the Secret Service advance agents did not have copies of all participating entities’ operations plans, nor did they have copies of the locations of each officer providing security.” Second, the task force recommended that the Secret Service should consider coverage both inside and outside the secure perimeter established for campaign events: “As part of its zero fail Mission, the Secret Service should assess and address all security concerns both inside and outside of any event perimeter.” 

The shooter had a clear line of sight to Trump

A significant finding in the report is that Crooks, from his position on the AGR building, had a clear line of sight to the stage on which Trump was speaking. “There was an unmitigated line of sight from the AGR complex to the stage, which was consequential for two reasons,” the task force wrote in its report. “First, Crooks was able to obtain a clear shot from the AGR roof to the stage where former President Trump stood. Second, the clear view of the stage through the fence attracted a crowd to the AGR property, which allowed Crooks to move freely and made it more difficult for law enforcement to locate him.” 

The report details that concerns about the lines of sight to the stage were discussed in the week before the July 13 rally. A senior special agent testified that conversations about addressing lines of sight took place “all week, every day.”

The report adds that while line-of-sight concerns were “consistently discussed throughout the advance process” for the rally, the plan to address them “was based on the flawed belief that local police would be in the area and that the local snipers and USSS Countersnipers had a direct line of sight to that area.

”To address such concerns, the task force recommended that Secret Service site agents “must identify all potential lines of sight to the protectee which a trained sniper could reasonably be expected to utilize, state how such lines of sight will be mitigated, and ensure that a supervisor has approved the mitigation strategy for each.”

The report also noted that Secret Service officials could have used black cloth or another opaque material to block ground-level lines of sight that were present on the day of the rally, which allowed spectators to line up along a nearby fence. “This would have precluded individuals from seeing into the event, and therefore likely have prevented a crowd from gathering there. This would have made it far easier for law enforcement to identify, locate, and track Crooks,” the task force concluded. 

Communications on the day of the shooting were fragmented

As was relayed to task force members during a September hearing on the assassination attempt, there were gaps in communication between law enforcement agencies on the day of the Trump rally. Members of both the Secret Service and local law enforcement entities told the task force that “communications on site could have been better.”

At events, Secret Service officials typically use a “security room” – an onsite communications center used to ensure law enforcement agencies can communicate with each other. According to the task force report, there was no unified command post in the July 13 security room, and state and local law enforcement officials testified to the task force that they didn’t recall the Secret Service inviting state or local law enforcement officials to join the security room. “The lack of collaboration between USSS, state, and LLE regarding which agencies would be present in the Security Room led to inadequate representation from local security partners,” the report reads. 

The report also states that four law enforcement agencies – the Pennsylvania State Police, the Butler County Emergency Services Unit, the Butler Township Police Department and the Butler County Sheriff’s Office – operated on different radio frequencies during the event. According to the task force, while local law enforcement entities could listen to each other’s channels, local agencies and the Pennsylvania State Police could not. 

The task force made several recommendations related to communications between agencies tasked with securing campaign events – including that the Secret Service should ensure that local law enforcement and state law enforcement are in a unified security room, and that the Secret Service should make sure that state and local partners have a communications plan in place for protectee events. 

“The fragmented communications structure and lack of timely information sharing resulted in missed opportunities for the Secret Service and its state and local partners to apprehend Crooks and make informed decisions about managing the protectee prior to shots fired,” the report reads. 

The full task force report can be viewed below.