After reviewing the agency’s security failures that resulted in Donald Trump’s near assassination in Pennsylvania this summer, an independent panel of former law enforcement officials appointed by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recommended a complete overhaul of Secret Service leadership.
In one of the most severe critiques of the agency to date, the panel chastised the Secret Service for its culture of “doing more with less” and the general lack of “critical thinking” that pervaded agents during and in the run-up to the Butler event, where Trump was shot and one rallygoer died.
“The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved,” the group wrote in its report issued Wednesday.
The panel, led by Mark Filip, deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush; Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama; and others, recommended that agency leadership be replaced with outside individuals who could change the Secret Service’s culture, including the “present sense of complacency within the Service.”
“Many of the difficulties noted by the Panel throughout this report, particularly those related to the Panel’s ‘deeper concerns,’ are ultimately due, directly or indirectly, to the Service’s culture. “A change in leadership with new perspectives will help the Service resolve those issues,” the panel wrote.
The agency is currently run by acting Director Ronald Rowe, who, while not identified directly in the report’s suggestion for leadership change, came up through the agency’s ranks and was appointed after Director Kimberly Cheatle quit in the aftermath of the near assassination.
The report heavily criticized the agency for failing to properly secure the Butler rally site, including failing to establish line-of-sight blockades, failing to secure the group of buildings the shooter accessed, failing to respond to reports of the shooter as a suspicious person more than an hour before Trump was shot, and a slew of other failures on the part of the agency and local law enforcement.
The panel attributed these failings to a lack of critical thinking among Secret Service officials in charge of security that day.
The panel also recommended that the agency relinquish some of its non-security functions, such as investigative work, some of which focuses on the financial crimes that the organization was formed to tackle.
“The Panel expresses extreme skepticism that many of the Service’s non-protective (investigative) missions meaningfully contribute to the Service’s protective capability and is concerned that they may materially distract from it,” according to the study.
The panel also criticized the Secret Service for failing to adequately beef up Trump’s security after learning of an assassination threat from “a foreign state actor” to the former president, as well as his already high-profile status as a former president and current Republican front-runner in the 2024 election. HEADLINESFOREVER earlier revealed that authorities had gathered intelligence regarding an Iranian conspiracy to assassinate Trump in the weeks leading up to the former president’s attempted assassination at a campaign event in Pennsylvania last July.
Other agency failings noted in the report included inexperience among personnel in charge of rally site security on that particular day.
“The site agent assigned by the Trump detail to coordinate with the Pittsburgh field office to conduct site advance work and site security planning for the Butler rally only graduated from the Service’s academy in 2020,” said the panel. That individual “had only been on the Trump detail since 2023, and had engaged in minimal previous site advance work or site security planning and certainly nothing to the level of the July 13 Butler rally.”
The panel also discussed communication breakdowns between the Secret Service and local law enforcement officials at the Butler event, who reported the shooter’s movements and suspicious activities throughout the day, such as gazing at the stage with a range finder.
The panel highlighted that, while the Secret Service claims to be working on a more integrated communications system, the federal government was aware of and addressed these vulnerabilities decades ago, following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
While the panel complimented agents for intervening to defend Trump after he was injured and immediately apprehending the shooter, it also stated that “bravery and selflessness alone, no matter how honorable, are insufficient to discharge the Secret Service’s no-fail protective mission.”