Butler shooting details expose the Secret Service’s shocking culture of incompetence

Thanks to the investigations of two Senate committees, Americans are getting a clearer picture of what went wrong leading up to the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pa. — and the details are beyond damning for the Secret Service.

Reporting, released by the Government Accountability Office and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, list a series of bungles and mishaps that would sound satirical if they didn’t have such deadly serious consequences.

First off, the agency denied a request for anti-drone systems for the rally, claiming those resources were already set aside for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and didn’t provide a Counter Assault Team liaison to coordinate between its agents and the local SWAT teams.

The agency almost didn’t send in the counter-sniper teams that ultimately took out shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, ending his bloody rampage; imagine the horrific consequences if it hadn’t.

The day of the rally, the agency’s drone detection equipment bugged out and was being repaired by an undertrained agent when Crooks flew a drone overhead to plan out his sick scheme.

And shoddy cell service kneecapped communication between the local cops and the Secret Service, since the agencies couldn’t radio each other directly.

These are tech issues that the Secret Service, alarmingly, had “no policy in place” to address.

And get this: Secret Service officials were told about a threat to Trump’s life, probably from Iran, 10 days before the shooting, but the agency “had no process to share classified threat information with partners” if it wasn’t considered “imminent.”

Leading up to the rally, the building that Crooks shot from was identified as a possible security concern because of its clear line-of-sight to where Trump would be speaking.

Jaw-droppingly, the Secret Service planned to use large farm equipment as a barrier between the building and the stage but decided on a jumbotron and a flag instead — because no one told the advance team that there were active threats on Trump’s life.

And then the staffers failed to tell their supervisor that the security concerns hadn’t been fixed.

For some reason, no one even thought to just post a few agents up on the roof.

The agency’s total failure to communicate ahead of time allowed Crooks to carry out his plan with no resistance, killing an rally-goer, Corey Comperatore and injuring Trump and two others.

How it is possible that no one was talking to each other?

This is an agency with a $3.1 billion budget, tasked with protecting America’s leaders and their families.

And it was thwarted by a 20-year-old with a rifle and a hobby drone thanks to dumb policies, poor decision-making, bad cell reception and faulty hardware.

The Secret Service has made some changes since then, like procuring a fleet of military-grade drones and establishing mobile command posts so that agents can talk to local law enforcement.

But it’s clear that procedural changes need to happen within the Secret Service, too, so that vital information is shared between teams and no one is left in the dark about potential threats.

There is no excuse for what happened in Butler.

Fixing the Secret Service’s culture is the only way to prevent it from happening again.