The bipartisan report shows that the Secret Service could have stopped the injuries to Donald Trump and other rallygoers as well as the death of Corey Comperatore if they had paid attention to the report of a “suspicious man with a rangefinder near the AGR building around 27 minutes before the shooting.”
It doesn’t matter if the Secret Service was careless or not; their mistakes cost a life and changed American politics. It’s time for those responsible for this and other terrible mistakes at the Pennsylvania gathering to take big responsibility.
The new Senate Homeland Security Committee report has a lot of important information in it. I’ll list some that I found especially troubling and important below. It’s important to remember that the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) reported that the “technical problems” some agents had with their radios at the gathering, which led to the disaster, “are routine for USSS.” That’s not okay at all. This is what the study says:
“A USSS member told them about a strange person with a rangefinder who was near the AGR building about 27 minutes prior to the shooting… This information reached the USSS Security Room around 5:44 pm and the Counter Sniper Leader at 5:45 pm. Soon after, USSS members, including a Counter Sniper agent, started looking for the person on the ground. But the Site Agent, USSS Advance Agent, and Site Counterpart all said to the Committee that they did not get this information. This means that they did not know that local police had seen a suspicious person with a rangefinder and then lost track of that person until after shots were fired.”
“USSS knew there was someone on the AGR roof about two minutes before Thomas M. Crooks fired from the AGR roof. And three minutes before the shots were fired, a cop in the area sent out a radio message saying that someone was on the AGR roof. The USSS Security Room got this information about two minutes before Crooks fired. A local officer sent out a radio warning about 22 seconds before Crooks fired, saying that the person on the AGR roof was armed. However, this information was not reportedly shared with key USSS staff that the Committee spoke with.”
The whole study is over 100 pages long, so this is just a small part of it. But it’s enough to show how horribly the Secret Service failed to protect Trump and how dangerously careless and foolish the agents were. The local police seem to have done more to keep the former president safe than the USSS workers whose job it is to do that. We need to hold those responsible accountable now.
