Almost two years after Thomas Crooks fired eight shots at President Trump from a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, a new federal report spells out how close the Secret Service came to stopping it and how many times it failed.
The DHS Office of Inspector General released report OIG-26-13 on June 30, 2026. The title alone tells the story.
It is called The Secret Service Missed Opportunities to Prevent and Disrupt the Attempted Assassination of President Trump on July 13, 2024.
Crooks fired from the roof of the American Glass Research complex during the July 13, 2024 campaign rally. President Trump was wounded, others were wounded, and one spectator was killed.
The findings are worse than a bad day. They read like a chain of warnings that never reached the people who could have acted on them.
UPDATE: Thomas Crooks —Unbelievable!
🚨 New DHS Report shows Secret Service agents tried to move Trucks to obstruct the Line of Sight from the AGR Building, but Trump’s Campaign staff rejected the idea because the trucks would be “too close to President Trump’s press shot.”
An… https://t.co/c1OeoyKAiZ pic.twitter.com/XcwXUsGC15
— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) July 3, 2026
Start with the line of sight, because that is where the report gets specific.
The Secret Service had already identified the AGR complex as a line-of-sight concern. That is the exact rooftop Crooks used.
According to the OIG, the site agent’s counterpart proposed placing trucks that were already on location between the AGR building and the stage to block that sightline.
Protectee staff denied the request. The reason, per the report, was that the trucks would be too close to President Trump’s press shot.
An alternative placement nearby was agreed to. But the trucks were never actually placed there, and agents did not escalate the problem.
The DHS Office of Inspector General concluded that the Secret Service identified the AGR line of sight as a danger and simply did not ensure the available resources blocked it. OIG also noted that agents failed to monitor whether the agreed equipment placement happened or elevate the exposed sightline once the problem remained.
The report also documents the drone. Crooks flew one from 3:51 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, and it viewed both the stage and the AGR roof.
The Secret Service counter-drone system was inoperable at the time. Crooks scouted the scene from the air and nobody caught it.
Then there is the communications breakdown, which is staggering in scale.
Local law enforcement passed 102 radio transmissions about an increasingly intense search for a suspicious person. The Secret Service received only five phone calls and three text messages about Crooks.
The protective detail was never warned that Crooks had a range finder, a long gun, and had climbed onto the AGR roof.
Multiple members of that detail told the OIG that if they had known about the ongoing search, they would have delayed the speech or removed President Trump from the stage.
UPDATE: Thomas Crooks — Insane!
🚨 New DHS Report: The Secret Service Failed to Secure AGR Roof Crooks Used – Despite KNOWING State Police Left It Exposed
The DHS Office of Inspector General found that Pennsylvania State Police sent their operations plan on July 12, 2024. It… https://t.co/1AaeuoA64p pic.twitter.com/xwQWfdRNlH
— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) July 3, 2026
The roof itself should never have been left open, and the report says the Secret Service had reason to know it.
Pennsylvania State Police emailed an operations plan on July 12, 2024, the day before the rally. It laid out areas outside the perimeter to secure, but it did not include securing the AGR complex.
The lead agent and site agent reviewed that plan. According to the OIG, they did not provide comments or clarification, and the explanations agents later gave were inconsistent with Secret Service policy.
So the gap sat in writing, in an email, the day before, and it went unaddressed.
The most alarming detail may be what happened in the communications room minutes before the shooting.
At about 6:09 p.m., local law enforcement warned the Secret Service and PSP communications room about a suspicious person on the AGR roof.
The Secret Service communications supervisor and the counter-drone operator did not even ask where AGR was located. The counter-drone operator instead searched online for the location and was still searching when the shots began.
The New York Post highlighted that same finding, noting that as the warnings came in about the rooftop, a Secret Service member was still googling the building’s location when Crooks fired. That detail fits the broader timeline: local officers were moving faster than the federal team, while the protective detail still did not have the rooftop warning.
The report also exposes a failure that happened well before anyone reached Butler.
Secret Service leadership received classified intelligence about a long-distance threat to President Trump. But the agency’s protective intelligence division never got permission to share that classified threat with the people who needed it.
That means the Pittsburgh Field Office leadership, the lead agent, the site agent, and the lead counter sniper went into the event without it.
Officials at the Pittsburgh Field Office told the OIG they would have requested additional personnel had they known. One said she would have zeroed in on the AGR complex specifically.
UPDATE: Thomas Crooks — Very Bad..
🚨 New DHS Report shows the Secret Service HID Classified Threat Intelligence From Its Own Field Agents about a “Long Distance” Threat — Leading to Too Few Protectors at the Rally
Days before the rally, the Secret Service received classified… https://t.co/HzxoxD6KUT pic.twitter.com/buQzV7Zpez
— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) July 3, 2026
Senator Chuck Grassley reached a similar conclusion in his own oversight work.
His office’s release, tied to a GAO review, said senior Secret Service officials had classified intelligence about a threat to President Trump’s life roughly ten days before the rally and failed to relay it to the federal and local personnel responsible for security.
Grassley’s release said the GAO found the Secret Service had no process to share classified threat information with partners when it was not treated as an imminent threat to life.
It also cited planning failures, resource allocation problems, training gaps, communication breakdowns, and the same line-of-sight issue. Grassley’s release noted that a campaign staffer objected to using large farm equipment to address the AGR sightline because it would interfere with press photos.
His release added that enhanced counter-drone equipment was not provided because resources were allocated elsewhere, while counter-sniper resources were separately approved.
The OIG issued seven recommendations, and the Secret Service concurred with all of them. Recommendations 1, 4, and 6 were resolved and closed, while 2, 3, 5, and 7 remain resolved and open.
That is the paperwork. The human cost is what actually happened on that field.
A spectator was killed. Others were wounded.
President Trump was hit and survived by inches.
Every one of these failures was catchable. The threat intel existed.
The rooftop concern was known. The radio traffic was screaming.
The drone was in the air. And still the man got on that roof and pulled the trigger eight times.
This report is a permanent record of how a preventable attack was allowed to happen, and it is the standard the country should measure the Secret Service against from here forward.
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