Two minutes. That's how long Secret Service agents had between the moment local law enforcement flagged a suspicious man on a rooftop with a rifle and the moment Thomas Crooks opened fire on Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In those two minutes, no one told the president's own protective detail what was happening above them.
That damning finding sits at the center of a newly released, unredacted report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, a document built on 92 interviews, more than 70,000 records, and a 3D reconstruction of the Butler Farm Show grounds where the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt took place.
The report does not describe a single point of failure. It describes a cascade of them, broken equipment, untrained operators, severed communications, and a security apparatus that, at the moment it mattered most, failed to pass along the most basic warning: a 20-year-old with a long gun had a clear line of sight to the former and future president of the United States.
Before the rally even began, Crooks flew a drone over the event site to surveil the stage. The Secret Service never detected it. The DHS Inspector General's report found that the agent assigned to counter-drone operations had received just 20 minutes of informal training. A broken ethernet cable compounded the problem, and it wasn't fixed until roughly 30 minutes after Crooks had already completed his aerial reconnaissance.
That sequence alone should alarm anyone who expects the federal government to competently protect a presidential candidate. But it was only the beginning.
Local law enforcement officers spotted Crooks and began transmitting warnings. They sent 102 radio transmissions from a separate communications room in the run-up to the shooting. The Secret Service received none of them. Not one. The agency picked up only five phone calls and three text messages about a suspicious person, later identified as Crooks, during the critical window before shots were fired.
Three of those local transmissions specifically warned that the suspect had a long gun. The Secret Service never received those either.
At 6:09 p.m., local officers notified the Secret Service that a suspicious person was on the roof. At 6:11 p.m., Crooks fired eight rounds at Trump. One struck the former president's ear. Crooks, 20 years old, was fatally shot in the aftermath.
In between those two timestamps, the Secret Service agents who had been alerted to the threat did not relay the information to Trump's protective detail. The Inspector General's report offered a blunt assessment of why the warning never traveled up the chain. The OIG wrote:
"The limited communication regarding the suspicious person... did not create a sense of urgency for Secret Service members to report this information to President Trump's protective detail."
No sense of urgency. A man with a rifle on a rooftop overlooking a presidential rally, and the people responsible for the candidate's life did not treat it as urgent.
The OIG report did not pin the failure on one agent or one bad decision. It described an institution-wide collapse in the processes meant to prevent exactly this kind of attack. The report stated:
"The Secret Service's overall lack of policy and processes coupled with limited intelligence sharing and poor collaboration and communication with protectee staff and state and local law enforcement set the conditions that led to missing opportunities to prevent and detect the attempted assassination."
That language, "set the conditions", is the bureaucratic version of saying the system was broken long before Crooks ever climbed onto that roof. The Secret Service had no formal communications framework established with local law enforcement at the Butler event. Local officers were operating in a separate room, transmitting warnings into a void. The Pittsburgh Field Office lacked adequate intelligence sharing with its own leadership.
The report also faulted the agency for failing to share information with Trump's campaign staff in a way that might have changed the physical layout of the event. One detail stands out: Trump campaign staff refused to allow agents to park trucks that would have blocked the shooter's sightline, with staff saying the trucks would be "too close to [President Trump's] press shot." Whether better communication from the Secret Service about the threat environment might have changed that calculus remains an open question, but the fact that sightline security was overruled for camera angles speaks to a broader failure of priorities on the ground that day.
The Inspector General's office issued seven recommendations for the Secret Service to improve its event-security processes. But the scope of the failures it cataloged, from counter-drone incompetence to radio blackouts to a fundamental breakdown in the chain of communication, suggests the fixes required go well beyond procedural tweaks.
Several questions remain unanswered. The report does not appear to identify by name which Secret Service personnel knew Crooks was armed and on the roof, or explain precisely why those individuals chose not to alert the protective detail beyond citing systemic deficiencies. It does not provide a specific motive for Crooks. And neither DHS nor the White House had responded to requests for comment at the time the report's findings were published.
The report landed at a moment when the Secret Service is already under fresh scrutiny. Just weeks earlier, gunshots were fired at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, D.C. And FBI Director Kash Patel recently announced arrests connected to an alleged attack plot targeting a UFC event at the White House, an investigation that, by some accounts, appeared to catch the Secret Service off guard.
The Butler rally shooting was not a failure of intelligence in the traditional sense. The intelligence existed. Local officers saw the threat. They reported it, 102 times over radio, plus phone calls and texts. They identified the weapon. They gave the location. The information was there, moving through channels that led nowhere.
What failed was the institution itself. The Secret Service lacked the policies, the training, the equipment, and the internal culture of urgency needed to act on what it was being told. A drone operator with 20 minutes of training. A broken cable left unrepaired during a presidential event. A hundred-plus radio transmissions swallowed by a communications gap no one had bothered to close.
The OIG built its findings on a foundation most government reports never achieve, 92 interviews, tens of thousands of documents, and a physical reconstruction of the scene. This was not guesswork. It was a methodical accounting of how the most elite protective agency in the world let a 20-year-old with a rifle get a clear shot at a president.
The Secret Service's job is singular: keep the protectee alive. Everything else, logistics, optics, interagency diplomacy, is secondary. On July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, the agency had the information it needed to do that job. It had two minutes. And it did nothing with either.
When the people paid to stop the unthinkable can't even pass along a phone call, the problem isn't a cable or a radio. It's the institution.
