A damning new inspector general report from the Department of Homeland Security has pulled back the curtain on the Secret Service’s catastrophic failure in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the details are genuinely shocking.
Here’s where it starts. While a gunman was perched on a rooftop just 155 yards from his target, a Secret Service counter-drone operator whose entire job was to identify and neutralize exactly this kind of threat was typing a search query into Google. Not alerting the protective detail. Not radioing local law enforcement. Googling the location of a building that local law enforcement had already called in two minutes earlier.
Local officers spotted Thomas Crooks on the roof at 6:09 p.m. and immediately called it in. The counter-drone operator, rather than grabbing his radio, opened a web browser. He was still searching when the first shot rang out at 6:11 p.m. Two minutes. That gap is now part of the official record.
As originally reported, the failures didn’t stop there. A Secret Service site agent had proposed a straightforward fix before the event even began: use trucks already on the grounds to block the line of sight from the AGR building to the stage. Campaign staff said no. The vehicles would interfere with camera shots. A basic security measure was overruled by optics concerns, and the agreed-upon alternative was never actually put in place. Supervisors were told local law enforcement would cover the AGR complex. Nobody followed up. Nobody verified. The gap stayed open.
Corey Comperatore, a retired volunteer fire chief, died that day. He threw himself over his wife and daughter when the shots started. Two other men were gravely wounded. The man on stage took a bullet to the ear and survived by a fraction of an inch.
The lead agent on the ground, Miyo Perez, was described in the report as relatively inexperienced for an assignment of this magnitude. That should have triggered scrutiny at every level of Secret Service leadership. It didn’t. And the two supervisors who oversaw her planning, who signed off on a security arrangement that left a clear line of fire to the stage unaddressed, faced no discipline whatsoever. They were promoted.
The official who ultimately approved the Butler security plan, Sean Curran, is currently serving as Director of the United States Secret Service.
Several agents were suspended without pay in the aftermath. But suspensions are not accountability. Not when a man lost his life. Not when two others barely survived. Not when the future president had to wipe blood from his own face in front of tens of thousands of people.
The inspector general report makes one thing impossible to ignore: this was not bad luck. It was a preventable, compounding series of failures, and the people most responsible for those failures have largely faced no lasting consequences at all.