WASHINGTON — After a week of oversights and failures, the officers protecting former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, still had one last chance to get it right. The chance lasted about 30 seconds.
It began when a local police officer peered over the roof of the AGR International warehouse near the rally grounds and found the suspicious man he and other officers were hunting. Ninety minutes of confusion about Thomas Crooks’ intentions and whereabouts had ended in an instant.
“Long gun!” the officer broadcast over the local law enforcement radio system, according to congressional testimony from the Secret Service this week.
It was urgent news that should have instantly traveled to a command center shared by the local police and the Secret Service, and then to agents close enough to throw their bodies in front of Trump. They still had time to disrupt an assassination attempt.
But the radio message never got to the Secret Service, and 30 seconds later Crooks unleashed his first shots.
That dropped communication was one of several instances in which technologies that might have protected Trump from getting shot July 13 did not.
The Secret Service, for instance, turned down offers to use a surveillance drone at the Butler Farm Show rally site. The agency also did not bring a system to boost the agents’ device signals in an area with poor cellular service. And some of the equipment the agency did bring, including a system to detect drone use by others, did not work when it was most needed.
The acting Secret Service director, Ronald Rowe Jr., told Senate lawmakers in a hearing this week that the agency had the tools that could have spotted Crooks and allowed agents to interrogate him before the shooting, but failed to properly use them.
“That has cost me a lot of sleep,” Rowe testified.
Rowe, in his testimony, said that he could not understand why the Secret Service chose to exclude the warehouse Crooks used, about 450 feet from Trump’s lectern, from its secure perimeter and why no countersniper was assigned to its roof.
But the problems were more than strategic errors on how to use law enforcement personnel. Current and former Secret Service and federal government officials, in interviews, acknowledged that the agency has long struggled to rapidly incorporate technology that could assist in its mission.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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