Forgotten radios and missed warnings: New details emerge about communication failures before Trump rally shooting
Originally Published: 23 AUG 24 07:00 ET
By Holmes Lybrand, Zachary Cohen and Majlie de Puy Kamp, CNN
(CNN) — The day before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a tactical team of local police officers set aside radios for their Secret Service partners so the two agencies could communicate during the former president’s July 13 campaign rally.
But those radios were never picked up.
The next day, three minutes before shots were fired toward Trump, local police radioed that a man was on a nearby roof. That warning never made it to the Secret Service, whose snipers didn’t know the would-be assassin was on the roof until shots rang out. In the 15 seconds it took for snipers to lock onto and kill the shooter, he was able to fire off eight shots.
Standing over the gunman’s dead body minutes later, a local police officer who responded to the initial warning expressed frustration that his own radio calls about a man on the roof seemed to go unheeded by the other officers.
“That’s what I was f**king calling out bro, f**king ‘On top of the roof,’” the officer said, according to body camera footage. “We’re not – we on the same frequency?”
More than a month after the near assassination, new details continue to emerge about the failures of that day. Congressional inquiries, local and federal law enforcement, and other sources who spoke with CNN reveal stunning gaps in communication, highlighting how crucial information was lost in a confusing thicket of police radio chatter, text messages, state trooper middlemen and command posts tasked with communicating with federal agents on the ground.
Details about the forgotten radios were included in a recent report from Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican member of the congressional task force investigating the events of that day. Higgins claims that a county emergency services commander had “personally reminded” Secret Service counter-sniper teams to pick up their assigned radios at a command post located at the Butler County Fairgrounds. “It didn’t happen,” according to Higgins’ report.
That detail was confirmed to CNN by Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger.
“I can confirm that the Butler County ESU team made radios available to the Secret Service and that they were not utilized by the Secret Service,” Goldinger said in a statement. While it’s unclear if Secret Service would have gotten the warning about a man on the roof had they picked up the radios, Goldinger said, “It is safe to assume that if a holder of an ESU radio was paying attention, they would have received the call.”
The Secret Service said in a statement that the agency will examine Higgins’ report and “is committed to investigating the decisions and actions of personnel related to the event in Butler, Pennsylvania” and will hold “our personnel accountable to the highest professional standards.”
Higgins and other members of the congressional task force are set to visit Butler on Monday, meeting with local officials and tour the rally site in their first major investigative step since their inception.
All eyes on Secret Service
The morning after the shooting that pierced Trump’s ear and left one rallygoer dead, local law enforcement and federal officials met together to go over the day’s events, a source with knowledge of the meeting told CNN. Shortly after the meeting started, officials started to realize the severe communication failures that day, as several groups had different time stamps for when the gunman was first identified as a threat.
“They didn’t have a whole lot of information other than, ‘Hey, this is what we did, and this is when we did it,’” the source said of the morning-after debrief, noting that the disjointed timelines made clear that each law enforcement agency tasked with protecting the former president that day was largely operating independently of one another, rather than as a cohesive team.
As the timeline of the day’s events has come into focus, the Secret Service has borne the brunt of the blame for the lack of coordination and a clear, unencumbered communication structure.
“This was a Secret Service failure,” acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe told reporters during a news conference earlier this month – a clear shift in tone from when the agency previously pointed blame on locals for their failure to keep eyes on would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks that day. “That roof should have been covered.”
According to multiple current and former law enforcement officials interviewed by CNN, the Secret Service hasn’t adopted existing tools, including a nationwide broadband network developed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, designed to increase communication between law enforcement and first responders.
Instead, the Secret Service relies on a fragmented system. Rather than talking directly with individual state and local officers on the ground, the agency routes those dispatches through intermediaries and command posts.
Without better communication systems, the agency is at times forced to rely on spotty cellular service, as it did on July 13 in the rural Butler fairgrounds of western Pennsylvania. Limited bandwidth that day was crowded out by the thousands of rally goers using their phones. As a result, counter-snipers had difficulty texting pictures of the gunman when he was identified as suspicious.
The lack of cell coverage also limited the Secret Service’s ability to deploy a counter-drone system that could have detected Crooks’ own drone, which he flew over the area hours before Trump took the stage.
When the president travels, the Secret Service leans on several others in the federal government, such as the White House Communications Agency and the Department of Defense, to bolster cell coverage and provide bulletproof glass and other infrastructure needed to protect the highest position in government. These security measures were not extended to presidential candidates.
Since the shooting, the Secret Service has added its own mobile communications apparatus to create a private cellular network for Trump’s detail, both at his campaign events and to his motorcade, a federal source familiar with the planning told CNN. The agency also is surrounding Trump with ballistic glass at outdoor rallies and has increased the number of agents on his detail.
But the issue of how to directly communicate with local law enforcement remains unresolved.
“Local officials were penned in by a cumbersome hierarchical system of reporting that stymied the flow of urgent information from one unit to the next,” Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa told CNN in a statement. The powerful Republican has spearheaded his own probe into the assassination attempt.
“There was no unified radio channel for all law enforcement on the premises to communicate in the event of an emergency — instead, units connected over various radio channels, group chats and even emails,” Grassley said. “Officers relied heavily on spotty cell service to get their messages through, and were often unsure if the right law enforcement entity received them.”
The solution, people familiar with the Secret Service communication infrastructure have told CNN, is not as easy as plugging local law enforcement into the agency’s communication platforms, which are encrypted, connected to the US military and heavily protected by the NSA.
“It’s not as simple as people are putting it out to be,” Jonathan Wackrow, a CNN law enforcement analyst and former Secret Service agent, told CNN.
The agency, Wackrow said, needs to invest in training agents to better engage with local law enforcement and communicate to each person on the ground what their exact role is and how to communicate with the agency.
The source familiar with security planning among agencies and local law enforcement who told CNN about the day-after briefing said the issue is exacerbated by historical mistrust between federal and local officials.
“It’s always hard because agencies are so proprietary, it’s the same thing – back to 9/11, same thing – it’s hard to get people out of their own little world and agree to share information,” the source told CNN. “And then there’s always concern about leaks, or somebody leaking information and who has access to it. How’s it controlled?”
In a statement to CNN, the Secret Service noted that the task of creating a platform for agents and officers to quickly communicate is “a complicated undertaking, and it will take a whole of government approach to fix this technical issue, which will require both time and resource investments.”
The agency has established a task force inside of the Department of Homeland Security to find potential solutions to the communication hurdles.
Bygone training exercises
There also appear to have been processes that could have been put in place years earlier that sources tell CNN could have helped that day.
A recent drop-off in training exercises between local and federal law enforcement agencies on how to handle large events may have contributed to communication breakdowns that day.
Those table-top exercises, which focus heavily on making sure law enforcement partners are using the proper channels of communication, have been significantly reduced since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Another key issue, the source familiar with interagency security planning says, is that communication between the parties is a manual process and, in the past, there have been issues as simple as local law enforcement officers not being able to communicate with the agency because people were on the wrong radio channel.
The problem of having two command posts, where information would travel from local officers in one command post to agents in another, was also instrumental in the communication breakdown that day.
“What I continually see happen again and again is someone will say they’ve assigned a liaison, which oftentimes turn into a single point of failure,” the person told CNN.
On July 13, two command posts were established, one controlled by local law enforcement and the other by the Secret Service, according to multiple people familiar with the security setup that day. The agency’s command post had a representative from the State Police who acted as the bridge between local officers and the Secret Service, according to congressional testimony.
In the wake of the shooting, acting Director Rowe has ordered every field office in the Secret Service to either create a single centralized command post for each event or have a representative present at the local command post to streamline communication, a federal law enforcement source familiar with the decision told CNN.
The congressional task force has pledged to investigate the communication breakdown that day, making clear the Secret Service and local law enforcement will face additional questions as their probe intensifies in the lead-up to the 2024 election this November.
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