According to a bipartisan Senate investigation, the failures that occurred before the shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in July could have been avoided. The failures were “predictable, preventable, and (were) directly related to the events that resulted in the assassination attempt that day.” The report was published this Wednesday.
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Technological Failures of the Secret Service
The internal investigation, the House of Representatives inquiry, the preliminary report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs found many failures at all levels before the shooting.
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The failures in Butler, Pennsylvania originated from the planning, communications, security, and resource allocation.
"The consequences of these failures were disastrous," said Gary Peters, Democratic senator from Michigan and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.
No chain of command at Trump rally
The investigation revealed that there was no chain of command between the Secret Service and other security agencies, and even less a plan to cover the adjacent buildings, where the shooter was located.
In fact, the agents had independent radio channels, so communication was lost and the person handling the drones did not have the experience to get out of the assistance line when the reports started.
The communications between the security officials were a "multi-step telephone game," Peters pointed out.
"Accumulation of errors"
The communications were isolated and the Secret Service "did not ensure it could share information with its local law enforcement partners in real time," says the report.
Among the identified errors were that the Secret Service "planned" to set up in the same building from which the shooter fired, instead of on the roof. Another mistake was that the local police sniper sent a text message to the Secret Service's counter-sniper team leader about the man who would shoot Trump, and the Secret Service leader took seven minutes to send an email with the information and photos.
“What happened here was actually an accumulation of errors that resulted in a perfect storm of astonishing failures. In a way, many of these individual errors, if corrected in time, could have prevented this tragedy. And, clearly, it was a tragedy. A man died, a former president was nearly assassinated, and it was completely avoidable from the start,”, said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, who chairs the investigations subcommittee.