The July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was “preventable and should not have happened,” according to a bipartisan House task force investigating the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The task force on Monday released a 53-page interim staff report detailing evidence the panel has obtained in the first phase of its investigation. 

The evidence shows inadequate planning and coordination between the Secret Service and its law enforcement partners ahead of the July 13 rally and “fragmented lines of communication and unclear chains of command” on the day of the event contributed to the assassination attempt, the report said. 

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The task force’s preliminary findings are based on briefings from the Secret Service and FBI, thousands of documents, and 23 interviews of state and local law enforcement officials. 

The interim report primarily highlights security failures gleaned from those interviews, including two local snipers and another local officer who all independently spotted the eventual shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, acting suspiciously before the rally started. 

The task force said officers could have engaged Crooks “at several pivotal moments,” but “fragmented lines of communication allowed Crooks to evade law enforcement.” 

The House’s interim findings follow last week’s report from an independent review panel of former federal and state law enforcement officials who investigated the Butler assassination attempt. A Senate committee investigating the events of July 13 released its own interim report last month, focused on the Secret Service’s security failures. 

The next phase of the House task force investigation will include more of the Secret Service’s perspective. The panel said it is in the process of conducting more than 20 interviews with federal officials.

The interim report broke the security failures down into three broad categories: advance planning, lines of sight, and communications. 

Advance planning

In planning for the July 13 rally, the Secret Service “did not give clear guidance to the relevant state and local agencies about managing areas outside the secure event perimeter,” including the AGR International complex where Crooks accessed the roof of a group of warehouses to fire at Mr. Trump, the task force said.

The report took issue with the Secret Service’s decision to leave the AGR complex outside the security perimeter “despite proximity to a main road, clear sight lines to the stage, and its elevated overlook.”

Confusion about who would secure the complex spread amid “scattered meetings, vague instructions, and unclear chains of command,” the task force said. 

Lt. John Herold of the Pennsylvania State Police, testified that the Secret Service did not request that his department place assets at the AGR complex and that he understood the Butler County Emergency Services Unit (ESU) to be responsible for securing that area. 

However, the Secret Service said Lt. Herold told its agents that he had spoken to the owner of the AGR property and “coordinated it to be closed, locked, and posted.” 

Ultimately, the AGR complex was closed to vehicle traffic but crowds of people were allowed to gather outside of the chain-link fence that separated it from the Butler Farm Show grounds, where the rally was held. Those people did not have to go through magnetometers for screening, as those inside the rally did. 

Concerns with building

Drew Blasko, a patrolman with the Butler Township Police Department and an assistant team leader with the Butler ESU sniper team, raised concerns about the AGR complex with the Secret Service on July 11. 

He said the Butler ESU snipers who would be positioned inside the AGR building would have overwatch of the rally venue but “no vantage point” to the broader AGR complex, which included a cluster of warehouses outside the one in which they were posted.

Mr. Blasko told the Secret Service that local law enforcement did not have the additional manpower to post anybody outside the AGR warehouses and “requested additional people to be posted there so there would be no access to those grounds.” 

The Secret Service told him “they would take care of it,” Mr. Blasko said. 

A separate Butler ESU official told the task force that during a July 11 walk-through a Secret Service official “explained that there were to be uniformed officers in the area that day [but] that didn’t take place.”

The Secret Service and local law enforcement held separate briefings the day of the rally, which “may have led to gaps in awareness among state and local law enforcement partners as to who was stationed where, spheres of responsibility, and expectations regarding communications during the day,” the task force said. 

For instance, the panel cited a witness from the Butler County Sheriff’s Office who expressed concern to a colleague about the AGR complex being outside the perimeter with no law enforcement posted near the warehouses. 

The colleague responded that Pennsylvania State Police “has that covered.”

The lack of coordination and clarification contributed to the failure to address the clear line of sight from the AGR building to the stage where Mr. Trump was speaking. 

Edward Lenz, commander of the Butler ESU, testified that the Secret Service never asked him to put a sniper team on top of the roof of the AGR complex, nor did it object to the decision to place his team in the second floor of the AGR building to provide overwatch of the rally site. 

“The Butler ESU snipers offered other reasons for their placement in the AGR complex, such as the fact that the building was outside the secure perimeter and thus vulnerable to ‘360 degree exposure’ to threats, and the extreme heat at the rally that day,” the report said.

Communications failures

Communications were also a major issue, as there was not a unified command post. 

The Secret Service’s command post only included one representative from the Pennsylvania State Police and someone from the Butler County Department of Emergency Services (EMS) who was focused on communications related to medical events during the rally. 

The Butler EMS official said the Secret Service requested only one representative from local agencies be in its command post and he volunteered. The command post had approximately 30 chairs, but only six people were at fixed positions, he said. 

That left local law enforcement out of the loop, as they were located in their own command post and did not have a dedicated radio link with the Secret Service command post. 

The Butler EMS official said he did not hear local law enforcement communications regarding a suspicious individual at the AGR complex, which turned out to be Crooks. 

Secret Service records show that information did not reach their command post until about 5:51 p.m., the report said. “By then, Crooks had been under scrutiny by the Secret Service’s state and local partners for approximately 40 minutes.”

In the moments before the shooting, a local officer radioed that Crooks was on the roof with a gun. The task force found no evidence that information was ever passed to Mr. Trump’s detail, who could have removed him from the stage. 

Chances missed

The task force interviewed three local officers who all separately noticed Crooks before the rally began. 

A Butler ESU Quick Response Force officer stationed inside the secure perimeter behind the stage saw Crooks sometime between 4:30-5 p.m. when looking out toward the AGR property.

The officer said Crooks was secluded from others who had crowded on the property, “not paying attention to the venue, not paying attention to anyone around him.” He saw him at times sitting on a concrete wall and playing on his phone, while also clocking Crooks look up at the local snipers in the AGR building. 

One of the Butler ESU snipers stationed inside the AGR building also observed Crooks behaving suspiciously shortly before 5 p.m.

“He was walking around the grassy area between AGR and the secondary fence line, kept looking up, looking at the building. One point that is what raised my suspicion is he was looking directly at the window I was positioned at,” the local sniper said. 

The sniper said he thought Crooks was trying to see whether anyone was in the building. “And when he went up against the building to where I couldn’t look down on him, I found that to be very suspicious,” he said. 

After he lost sight of Crooks, the Butler ESU sniper provided his description to a Beaver County ESU sniper who was stationed with him inside the AGR building. The Beaver sniper had not seen Crooks at that moment but later spotted him after 5 p.m. “walking pretty close to the building, kind of looking up and down the building, and just thought it was odd.”

The Beaver sniper initially lost sight of Crooks but found him again and snapped two pictures. Shortly after, he observed Crooks with a rangefinder, and told the Butler sniper, who suggested he notify local law enforcement leadership. The task force said it was not clear that either sniper did so at that time.

The Butler sniper sent a series of text messages to the Butler ESU quick response force officer at 5:15 p.m. with a description of Crooks and flagging that he had a rangefinder. 

The officer said he did not see those text messages until 20-some minutes later, but he had observed Crooks moving in and out of sight near the edges of the AGR complex as he surveyed it from his post inside the rally using binoculars. 

The quick response officer phoned the Butler sniper after he saw his texts. They confirmed they had been monitoring the same person and decided to report their observations to law enforcement leadership.

The Beaver County sniper texted the photos he took of Crooks to a group of local snipers at 5:38 p.m. with a warning that he was lurking around the AGR building and used a rangefinder to look towards the stage. 

“FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him,” the Beaver sniper wrote.

The last moments

Over the next 13 minutes, “a series of calls and messages about Crooks’ description and movements reached the Secret Service,” the report said.

For example, Mr. Blasko, who had received the Beaver sniper’s text, shared the information with a Secret Service agent stationed with him.

When Mr. Lenz received the information from one of his subordinates, he called the Pennsylvania State Police representative, who communicated it to others in the Secret Service command post with him.

The Butler ESU officer who called Mr. Lenz also texted the information about Crooks to the Secret Service’s counter sniper team leader. 

Despite the information being passed around through multiple channels, the task force said it uncovered no evidence that it was relayed to Mr. Trump’s detail or to the Secret Service agents in charge of rally security. 

The Beaver County sniper said he was moving around the 2nd floor of the AGR building trying to keep an eye on Crooks when around 6:06 or 6:07 p.m. he saw him standing by a picnic table with a backpack sitting on the ground.

“He grabbed that backpack, and then he took off running,” the sniper said. “Once he went in between the buildings, I could not see him anymore. And at that point I had then radioed to communication command.”

The sniper’s recollection appears to be a few minutes off as video footage shows Crooks using an HVAC unit to climb onto the AGR warehouses at 6:05 p.m. and move across the roofs in the subsequent minutes to take his shooting position. 

A Butler Township police officer spotted Crooks on the roof and radioed that information out at 6:08 p.m., which Mr. Lenz called into the PSP representative in the Secret Service command center. 

Two other Butler Township officers who heard their colleague’s radio transmission went to the AGR building, one hoisting the other up to get a visual.

The officer saw Crooks, “facing downrange towards the stage,” catch sight of him and point his firearm toward his face. He saw Crooks had a bookbag and magazines of ammunition before he fell to the ground.

“I don’t know if I reach for my gun, if I slip, but all I know from that point is I’m looking at him, and all my weight is on my, like, arms, my hands, and I don’t have a grip,” the Butler Township officer said. “The next thing I know is, I’m smack against the ground and fall.”

He immediately radioed that Crooks had a gun and shouted it to other officers nearby. Mr. Lenz said he deployed Butler ESU’s quick reaction force after hearing that radio transmission.

But it was too late. 

Crooks fired eight rounds at 6:11 p.m. — hitting Mr. Trump in the ear, killing one rallygoer and injuring two others — before he was killed by a Secret Service sniper.