The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a comprehensive report today, July 12, 2025, detailing critical failures by the U.S. Secret Service in securing the July 13, 2024, campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump resulted in one spectator’s death and injuries to others. The year-long audit, initiated in August 2024 at the request of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, exposed systemic issues including poor advance planning, resource misallocation, inadequate training for site agents, and pervasive communication breakdowns between federal and local law enforcement. These lapses allowed 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks to access a rooftop perch and fire shots, an event deemed preventable by the report. Overall, the findings underscore a pattern of mismanagement that compromised protective operations, with recommendations for structural reforms to enhance information sharing and security protocols.

Central to the GAO’s critique is the revelation that senior Secret Service officials were briefed on classified intelligence indicating a credible threat to Trump’s life exactly 10 days before the rally, on July 3, 2024. This threat, identified as an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump potentially involving a long-range sniper, was unrelated to Crooks but highlighted elevated risks that should have prompted heightened vigilance. Despite this, the information was not disseminated to key personnel involved in rally security planning, including the special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office and local law enforcement partners. The report attributes this failure to “siloed information-sharing practices” and overly restrictive policies on classified data, noting that only high-level executives received the initial briefing, with partial details shared with Trump’s protective detail on July 8 but not specifics or broader alerts. As a result, opportunities to declassify or share the intel in a usable form were missed over the intervening days.

The Secret Service’s withholding of this prior threat knowledge directly contributed to inadequate security measures at the Butler site, as agents and partners operated without full awareness of the risks, leading to denials of requests for enhanced assets like additional countersnipers, drone mitigation technology, and ballistic glass. Local officials later stated they would have demanded more resources had they been informed, potentially altering the event’s security posture and preventing Crooks’ access. The GAO report concludes that this breakdown in communication exacerbated other procedural flaws, such as inconsistent asset approvals and unaddressed line-of-sight vulnerabilities, ultimately enabling the preventable tragedy. To rectify these issues, the report proposes eight recommendations, including proactive threat information sharing across all levels and with partners, clearer assignment of protective responsibilities, and a documented list of available security assets to avoid future silos and enhance protectee safety.