WASHINGTON: Lawmakers probing the Pennsylvania assassination attempt against Donald Trump blamed Secret Service failures during their first hearing on Thursday for a series of security lapses that allowed a gunman to open fire on the Republican presidential nominee.

The Secret Service initially blamed local law enforcement over the July 13 attack at Trump’s campaign event in Butler, which left one man dead and the ex-president nursing a bloodied ear where a bullet grazed him. But members of a cross-party House task force set up to investigate the incident heard that the agency, which protects US political leaders, communicated poorly over securing the nearby building that gunman Thomas Michael Crooks scaled and took aim from.

Witnesses from several law enforcement agencies described chaotic and piecemeal organisation in the hours before Trump took the stage, with no central command post in charge of messaging and instructions shared haphazardly. “In the days leading up to the rally, it was not a single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our country’s most elite group of security professionals — there were security failures on multiple fronts,” said Republican co-chair Mike Kelly, whose hometown is Butler.

His Democratic counterpart Jason Crow praised local police but said communication between all the agencies involved had been “disjointed and unclear.” The panel was set up days after the shooting and has carried out two dozen interviews with local police, met with federal agents and received more than 2,800 pages of documents from the Secret Service.

Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2024