A new Senate committee report on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, described the events as a “cascade of preventable failures” and called for more severe disciplinary action to be taken with the Secret Service in the future.
In the 31-page, highly critical findings released on Sunday, the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee lamented the mishandling of communications around the rally and said Trump was denied extra security on the day.
“A 20-year-old gunman was able to evade detection by the country’s top protective agency for nearly 45 minutes,” the committee stated, adding that “not a single person has been fired”.
The publication of the report comes exactly a year after the attempted assassination of Trump, when he was wounded after a bullet grazed his ear on 13 July 2024. One rally-goer, Corey Comperatore, was killed before the shooter, a 20-year-old nursing-home worker from Pennsylvania named Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by a Secret Service agent. Crooks scaled a building overlooking the rally and opened fire using an AR015-style rifle.