Report: Secret Service was offered radios to communicate with local police day before Trump shooting, never picked them up

BUTLER, PA - According to a report submitted by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), a member of the congressional task force investigating the assassination attempt, Secret Service agents never picked up radios assigned to them by a local tactical team in Butler, Pennsylvania.

A lack of coordinated communication among various law enforcement agencies has been blamed partly for an information breakdown that led to no communication between the Secret Service and other police agencies assigned to event security at the Trump rally, Newsmax reported. 

In the report, Higgins said that a Butler County Emergency Services Unit (ESU) commander “personally reminded” Secret Service countersniper teams on the Friday before the incident to pick up the radios at the ESU Command Post RV at the Butler Fairgrounds on the morning of July 13. 

“The radio comms were properly and perfectly arranged during the extensive pre-mission planning,” Higgins wrote. 

That failure became an issue when three minutes before the shots were fired at Trump, local police radioed that a man was on a nearby roof, CNN reports. Since the Secret Service failed to pick up the radios, the warning never got to them. The first Secret Service knew of the man on the roof was when the would-be assassin fired shots at the former president.

In the 15 seconds it took for police snipers to target the gunman, he was able to fire off eight shots. 

The failure of the Secret Service to take out the gunman before he shot at Trump frustrated one local police officer, who was fuming that his own radio calls about a man on the roof appeared to have gone ignored by other officers.

“That’s what I was f*cking calling out bro, f*cking ‘On top of the roof,’” the officer said, according to body camera footage. “We’re not…we on the same frequency?” 

Higgins wrote that Butler County’s radios were not “interoperable” with the Secret Service, which is why the local agency assigned radios to the federal agency to facilitate communications between agencies. 

A local official confirmed Butler County made radios available to the Secret Service. 

“I can confirm that the Butler County ESU team made radios available to the Secret Service and that they were not utilized by the Secret Service,” Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said in a statement to CNN. “It is safe to assume that if a holder of an ESU radio was paying attention, they would have received the call.” 

The Secret Service has yet to adopt, 23 years later, a nationwide broadband network that was developed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, CNN reported. As a result, the Secret Service relied on the much less advanced cellular service network, which in rural western Pennsylvania has limited bandwidth. That was exacerbated by the thousands of rally attendees using their cellphones. CNN said that agents trying to text or receive photos of the shooter were having difficulties in doing so. 

The lack of cellular coverage has also been blamed for the lack of a counter-drone system being deployed, which could have detected the shooter’s drone, which flew over the area only hours before the former president took the stage. 

Right in the nick of time after the July 13 shooting, the Secret Service has begun using its own mobile communications system to create a private cellular network, CNN reported, however, that doesn’t solve the interoperability issue. 

The Secret Service, in a statement sent to CNN, said that such communications are “a complicated undertaking, and it will take a whole of government approach to fix this technical issue, which will require both time and resource investments.” 

The agency promised to examine Higgins’ report and “is committed to investigating the decisions and actions of personnel related to the event in Butler, Pennsylvania,” and will hold “our personnel accountable to the highest professional standards.” 

Higgins and other congressional members assigned to the task force are scheduled to visit Butler on Aug. 26, and will meet with local officials and tour the rally site in what is described as their first major investigative step since their inception. 

The communications breakdown was first acknowledged the morning after the shooting, a source told CNN. One issue uncovered was that various groups had different time stamps from when the shooter was first identified as a threat. 

“They didn’t have a whole lot of information other than, ‘Hey, this is what we did, and this is when we did it,’” the source told CNN on the morning after the debrief. The source said that the "Disjointed” timelines made it obvious that each agency tasked with protecting Trump was largely operating independently of one another instead of as a “cohesive” team. 

While the Secret Service initially tried to blame local law enforcement for the security screw up, as more information has come forth about the incompetence shown by the agency, they have begun to accept responsibility for Trump almost being killed. 

“This was a Secret Service failure,” Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe, who still has his job, said in a news conference earlier in August. “That roof should have been covered.” 

Many have argued that as a high-profile target who has been threatened with assassination by the government of Iran, Trump should have had increased protection, such as bulletproof glass and other protection typically extended to sitting presidents. In addition, other agencies, such as the White House Communications Office and the Department of Defense provide equipment to increase cell coverage to a sitting president. Trump was afforded no such protection. 

However, the bottom line is there was a communication breakdown between the Secret Service and other agencies. That issue was highlighted by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). 

‘Local officials were penned in by a cumbersome hierarchical system of reporting that stymied the flow of urgent information from one unit to the next,” Grassley told CNN in a statement. Grassley is conducting his own probe into the assassination attempt. 

“There was no unified radio channel for all law enforcement on the premises to communicate in the event of an emergency–instead, units connected over various radio channels, group chats, and even emails,” Grassley said. “Officers relied heavily on spotty cell service to get their messages through, and were often unsure if the right law enforcement entity received them.” 

Some, however, are making excuses for the agency. For example, Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and CNN law enforcement analyst said, “It’s not as simple as people are putting it out to be,” explaining that plugging local police into the Secret Service’s communications, which are encrypted, is not an easy task. He did not explain why the Secret Service couldn’t use radios provided by local law enforcement agencies to enhance communications. 

One other issue on July 13 was that two command posts were established–one controlled by local law enforcement and the other by the Secret Service. The Secret Service command post had a liaison from the Pennsylvania State Police, who acted as a conduit between local police and the Secret Service, according to congressional testimony. 

After the July 13 shooting, the acting director has instructed every field office to create a single centralized command post for each event or have a representative present at the local command post to streamline communications, a law enforcement source familiar with Rowe’s decision told CNN. 

Congress has promised to investigate the communications breakdowns that occurred in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, and only by the grace of God didn’t lead to President Trump’s assassination. Both the Secret Service and local law enforcement authorities can expect additional questions as the probe heats up in the lead-up to November’s general election.