Prior warning? Secret Service to face bombshell revelation from top Homeland watchdog

After a gunman shot up the White House a decade ago, exposing vulnerabilities at one of America’s iconic landmarks, lawmakers in Congress got an unexpected second dose of bad news.

“The Secret Service did not identify best practices and lessons learned from the 2011 White House shooting incident,” the Homeland Security Department inspector general wrote in a stinging 2016 report that warned that an agency with a zero failure mission failed to learn from one of its high-profile setbacks.

Now eight years later, with the Secret Service once again reeling from a spectacular failure, the same watchdog office is about to drop a fresh bombshell certain to impact the investigation into the near assassination of former President Donald Trump.  

Congress was briefed this week that months before the assassination attempt on Trump, Secret Service managers were warned by the Homeland inspector general about serious deficiencies, including communication woes with local police partners and inadequate training for agents who conducted security sweeps at events for protectees, sources told Just the News on Wednesday night.

The concerns flagged by Homeland Security Department Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari were related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but involve issues that have also been raised in the Secret Service's failures to stop a gunman from wounding Trump at a Butler, Pa., rally on July 13, the congressional aides said.

Some of the concerns could be made public as early as Thursday when Cuffari’s staff is expected to release to Congress a heavily redacted report that was completed in April and titled “USSS Preparation for and Response to the Events of January 6, 2021,” the aides said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because they weren’t permitted to talk to news media.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chairman of the House Administration subcommittee on oversight, has been pressing Cuffari to release the report and to resist extensive redactions being sought by the Secret Service and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Loudermilk told Just the News earlier this week he was prepared to issue a subpoena to force disclosure of the report.

“We need to get this ... report. We need to see it,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “And it needs to happen soon because we just created a task force to look at it. And ... I think there's important information there.”

According to the congressional sources, the report in April made several specific recommendations to then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle as a result of an internal investigation that found Secret Service agents failed to identify an active pipe bomb at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, and brought then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris within yards of the explosive device.

Congressional aides also told Just the News one of the findings was that the Secret Service should implement additional training related to security sweeps, such as the one that failed to detect the pipe bomb at the DNC back in 2021.

That recommendation created a heated response from Secret Service management, which insisted no additional training was needed because the agency had made some of its own changes in an April 2022 policy memo, the aides said.

Another recommendation related to communications with local law enforcement, which increasingly are called upon to assist Secret Service at major events like the Trump rally in Butler, Pa., the aides said.

During the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Secret Service needed to collaborate with other agencies including U.S. Capitol Police and Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police.

If both of those findings are formally released to Congress later this week, they will have immediate implications for simultaneous investigations ongoing in the House and Senate related to the July 13 assassination attempt.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has made public extensive information from local police authorities who worked with the Secret Service, including that the Secret Service failed to attend a briefing the morning of the Trump rally with local law enforcement, who then developed concerns about the eventual shooter more than 100 minutes before bullets began flying,

In addition, the Secret Service acknowledged it failed to cover the rooftop where the shooter fired from inside the event’s defined security perimeter even though it made for an ideal shooter’s nest.

One of the lawmakers participating in the Senate probe, Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kanas, told Just the News on Wednesday the failures of the Secret Service are so extensive that an outside emergency intervention team of experts needs to be imposed on the agency to affect immediate change.

“I feel like our Secret Service is using technology and protocols from last century, as opposed to we really need: people on the ground, especially out there hunting for the bad guy, not just protecting the president,” he said. “I want people that are experts, going out there and profiling bad guys, and I'm going to be right in his face and figured out who this person is. So I think it's a cultural upside down problem, and they have to start over."

A lack – or failure – of communication between the Secret Service and its local law enforcement partners was one of the key security pillars that appears to have failed at Trump’s Butler, Pennsylvania, rally. 

According to a detailed timeline assembled by Grassley after an investigation into the assassination attempt, local law enforcement spotted the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, nearly 100 minutes before he fired on Donald Trump and other rally attendees. 

Nearly an hour and a half before Trump took the stage, texts show that local law enforcement noticed Crooks “snuck in” and “parked by our cars.” This identification came more than a hour before a local officer photographed Crooks and sent the pictures in a group message with other officers on the sniper teams. The other snipers recommended that the officer notify the Secret Service about the suspicious individual, Just the News reported. 

The texts provided by Grassley indicate the local law enforcement team notified “command” about the suspicious individual, yet there is no indication that the Secret Service took any immediate actions regarding suspect. 

Other key security failures highlight communications before and during the shooting. In some cases, there were warning signs even before the rally. 

Shortly after the attempted assassination, a video emerged from the event that appears to show that rally attendees who were watching the speech from outside the fence warned the police that there was a suspicious individual climbing on the roof of the building from where Crooks ultimately opened fire. The video shows one man shouting, “Officer! Officer!” and a woman saying, “He’s on the roof!”

This video, which was disseminated widely on social media after the assassination attempt, was one of the first pieces of evidence that showed law enforcement became aware of Crooks prior to the shooting. 

Also, several attendees reported to local police officers that Crooks was suspicious while he was pacing near the metal detectors, according to the Associated Press. Crooks reportedly attempted to bring a rangefinder commonly used by shooting enthusiasts through the metal detectors, raising the suspicion of law enforcement.

In addition to a failure of effective communication between local law enforcement and the Secret Service, there were more warning signs and failures before the event that may have prevented it. 

According to the Washington Post, the local police assisting the Secret Service with security warned the agency that they did not have enough manpower or resources to station a patrol car outside the key building used in Crook’s assassination attempt. The Butler County District Attorney said the agency “was informed that the local police department did not have manpower to assist with securing that building.”

Additionally, the Secret Service was reportedly absent from the 9 a.m. briefing hosted by the Butler County Emergency Services Unit.

Ultimately one of the most startling security lapses is that the former president remained on the rally stage delivering his speech and was not evacuated by the Secret Service even though it was monitoring an active threat.

The videos of the event show no attempts by any of the officers to get Trump out of harm’s way on the stage before Crooks fired on him. Even after the would-be assassin shot multiple rounds at Trump and the crowd, the Secret Service seemed confused in its response.

USSS agents could be heard asking “What are we doing?” and “Where are we going from here?” on the microphone as they attempted to evacuate Trump, according to The Hill. For his part, Trump insisted that the agents let him find his shoes, and paused briefly to raise his fist and shout "fight!" to the crowd