Americans deserve answers on Secret Service’s Trump shooting failure

A full year (as of Sunday) after Matthew Thomas Crooks came within a hair of killing President Donald Trump, the nation still has no good answers as to the how or why of it.

That is, no clear info on the would-be assassin’s motives — and no satisfactory explanation of how the Secret Service let him come so very close to succeeding.

The New York Times managed to (seemingly) get access to Crooks’ web-browsing history, and still couldn’t say much of anything for sure.

His family won’t talk to the press; that may be wise of them, but is frustrating to the many Americans who feel we should know more.

He looks like a smart, lonely kid who sank into mental illness at an age common for the onset of several deep disorders; maybe we just can’t find out much more.

But we surely can learn more about the security failures that cleared the shooter’s way onto that roof.

Indeed, it’s pretty telling that only the determination of Corey Comperatore’s widow seems to have forced several Secret Service heads to roll — and it was only Thursday, three days before the anniversary, that six agents who worked the Butler, Pa., rally got suspended.

Not fired, suspended, for 10 to 45 days.

The timeline of what went wrong that day is damning: Crooks, armed with a rifle, was somehow able to get onto the roof of the the AGR building just 400 feet from the stage from where Trump would speak — a building the Secret Service had already identified as a security concern, yet somehow failed to secure.

Nearly 30 minutes before the shooting, local cops raised alarms that a suspicious man with a rangefinder was spotted hanging around the building.

And two minutes before, the Secret Service Security Room was told that someone was on the roof.

Yet with all of that information, agents failed to act in time to stop Comperatore from being killed and Trump from very nearly being killed.

This was no run-of-the-mill ball-dropping by one or two agents, but deadly incompetence on every level.

The agency’s Biden-era leadership may have slow-rolled any investigation or punishment once then-USSS Director Kimberly Cheatle quit soon after the epic failure, but shouldn’t Trump’s hires have caught up by now?

Getting to the facts is no impossible task; it starts with grilling each and every agent on duty that day, and the chain of command above them about each of their decisions: Give the public a complete accounting of who left the security team so undermanned; exactly how communications failed so badly; why information about a clear threat didn’t bring the appropriate response.

That should be a top priority for FBI Director Kash Patel.

Trump has graciously dismissed the whole thing as “a bad day” for the Secret Service, saying he has “great confidence in these people.”

But that doesn’t let his top people off the hook; this cannot happen again.

Imagine the national and global turmoil, had Trump turned his head just a second or two later.

At the very least, get Americans a full tick-tock timeline of exactly who decided what when, and so left such gaping holes in Trump’s security.

Expose everyone at fault, and hold them all accountable.