A Secret Service counter drone operator was searching the internet to find the building where Thomas Crooks had been spotted, and was still searching when Crooks opened fire on President Donald Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13, 2024. That detail, buried in a 64-page Department of Homeland Security inspector general report released Thursday, captures in a single image the cascading communications failures that left Trump's protective detail completely unaware a gunman had climbed onto a rooftop 155 yards from the stage.
The DHS inspector general report concluded the Secret Service "missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt" the assassination attempt. Crooks fired eight shots, grazing Trump's ear, wounding rally attendees, and killing one.
The findings paint a picture not of a single mistake but of an agency that failed at every link in the chain, from advance planning the day before the rally to the final seconds before gunfire.
Local law enforcement spotted trouble early. At 5:42 p.m., a radio transmission warned: "we had a younger white male long hair lurking around the AGR building, he was viewed with a rangefinder sighting the stage... we lost sight of him." The AGR building, the American Glass Research International complex, sat just 155 yards from where Trump would take the stage.
That warning never reached the Secret Service.
At 6:08 p.m., another local officer radioed: "I have someone on the roof with white shorts." One minute later, at 6:09 p.m., local law enforcement called the Secret Service and Pennsylvania State Police communications room directly, warning of a suspicious person on the AGR complex roof. The Secret Service communications room supervisor, the report found, did not recall learning the suspicious person was on the roof.
Instead of acting on the call, the supervisor handed off the task. He delegated communications about the suspicious person to a counter drone operator because it was "a 'busy time' on Secret Service radios" and the counter drone operator "was sitting near him and offered to help."
What followed defies belief. The counter drone operator did not ask the local law enforcement personnel in the room for the AGR complex's location. Instead, the operator pulled up a search engine and started looking for it online. The report states plainly: "Instead of asking local law enforcement personnel for the AGR complex's location, the counter drone operator searched online for it, and was still searching when Crooks fired his first shots."
At 6:11 p.m., a local officer transmitted: "He's armed, I saw him. He's laying down." Seconds later, Crooks fired. Then came the final transmission: "You need to deploy to the AGR building... male on the roof with a long gun. Shots fired!"
The inspector general identified a structural failure at the root of the breakdown. The Secret Service did not establish a joint communications room with local law enforcement for the Butler rally. That decision meant 102 radio transmissions about Crooks, broadcast by local officers over their own channels, went entirely unheard by Secret Service personnel.
The agency received only five phone calls and three text messages about Crooks. The report's conclusion was unsparing: "Ultimately, although members of the local law enforcement communications room were increasingly concerned by the presence of a suspicious individual as early as 5:42 p.m., Secret Service communications room personnel did not identify Crooks as an urgent threat before he fired shots."
The consequences of that failure were direct. "Secret Service decision-makers responsible for protecting President Trump while on stage at the Butler event were not made aware of Crooks' presence at any time," the report stated. Trump's protective detail received no alert. No one pulled the president off stage. No one delayed his appearance. The agency charged with keeping the president alive did not know a man with a rifle was lying prone on a rooftop a football field and a half away.
Survivors of the Butler rally shooting have since sued the federal government over the security failures that left them in the line of fire.
The failures began before the rally. On July 12, 2024, the day before the event, a site agent counterpart proposed placing trucks between the AGR complex and the stage. The trucks would have blocked the sightline from the rooftop Crooks eventually used.
Protectee staff denied the request. The reason: the trucks would be "too close to [President Trump's] press shot."
The site agent counterpart proposed a compromise, moving the trucks to a nearby location that would block the line of sight from a different area. Protectee staff agreed to the alternative placement. But the original vulnerability, the AGR rooftop with a direct line to the stage, remained open.
The report noted that the Secret Service communications room supervisor "did not ask for the AGR complex's location" and "did not immediately identify it as a risk." A building 155 yards from the stage, with a clear sightline, was not flagged as a threat.
The inspector general's investigation itself faced resistance. Newsmax reported that Secret Service leadership sent emails instructing employees to alert supervisors of any direct contact from DHS inspector general investigators. Senator Chuck Grassley raised concerns after a whistleblower shared an email showing management sought an "organized response" to the investigation. Grassley warned the email "could have a chilling effect on its employees from fully cooperating and providing information to the DHS OIG as well as congressional investigations out of fear of retaliation since supervisors will apparently be keeping tabs on their communications."
A bipartisan House task force interim report separately deemed the assassination attempt "preventable" and cited a "lack of planning and coordination" between the Secret Service and law enforcement partners.
Congressional scrutiny mounted rapidly after the shooting. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed then, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to testify, with the committee's spokesperson stating: "Americans demand and deserve answers from the director about the attempted assassination of President Trump and the Secret Service's egregious failures."
Cheatle acknowledged the agency bore responsibility. "The buck stops with me. I am the director of the Secret Service," she told ABC News. Yet she initially refused to resign, maintaining support from the Biden administration even as Republican leaders from both chambers called for her departure.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has gone further, citing Secret Service gaps and FBI stonewalling as grounds for deeper investigation into the shooting.
In the weeks after the shooting, Cheatle offered an explanation for why no agents were posted on the AGR building rooftop. Fox News reported her stating: "That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof." She also acknowledged the agency was aware of security vulnerabilities the building presented but chose to secure it from inside.
The inspector general's report makes clear that the problem was not the slope of a roof. It was the failure to communicate, coordinate, and act on warnings that came in over a span of 29 minutes. Local officers identified a man with a rangefinder at 5:42 p.m. They spotted him on the roof at 6:08 p.m. They called the Secret Service directly at 6:09 p.m. And the operator tasked with responding was typing a search query into a browser when the first bullet left the chamber at 6:11 p.m.
Just The News noted the report's conclusion that the Secret Service "missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt" the gunman before he fired shots that killed and wounded Americans at the rally.
The Secret Service did not immediately respond to the New York Post's request for comment on the report's findings.
Concerns about threats to the president and his allies have not diminished since Butler. Subsequent security incidents have kept the question of protective-detail readiness in the public eye.
The DHS inspector general report lays out a timeline that is difficult to read as anything other than institutional negligence. A man with a rangefinder scouted the stage for nearly half an hour in plain view of local officers. Those officers broadcast 102 warnings. The Secret Service heard none of them because it never set up a shared radio channel. When a direct phone call finally reached the agency's communications room, the supervisor handed the job to a drone operator who didn't know where the building was, and turned to Google to find out.
Meanwhile, a day earlier, a request to block the very sightline Crooks exploited was turned down so the cameras could get a clean shot.
One rally attendee is dead. The president of the United States took a bullet to the ear. And the agency responsible for preventing exactly this outcome did not know a gunman was on a rooftop until he started firing.
When the people charged with protecting the president need Google to find the threat, the failure is not a gap in technology. It is a gap in seriousness.