Secret Service needs overhaul, director from outside agency, says independent review panel

The next director of the Secret Service should come from outside the agency to inject “fresh thinking” into an organization that has “become bureaucratic, complacent, and static,” according to an independent panel that investigated the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

The Independent Review Panel, comprised of four former officials who served in top federal and state law enforcement roles, is the group President Biden ordered formed to conduct an external review of the security failures that led to Mr. Trump nearly being killed at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The panel’s 52-page report issued Thursday took the Secret Service to task for specific problems leading up to the rally, including failure to address line-of-site issues to the stage or implement coordinated communications. It also dove into deeper issues within the agency’s culture, including “corrosive” attitudes about doing more with less, a lack of critical thinking and the failure of senior personnel to take ownership of security responsibilities.

“The Secret Service as an agency requires fundamental reform to carry out its mission,” the authors wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accompanying the report. “Without that reform, the Independent Review Panel believes another Butler can and will happen again.”

In Butler, Mr. Trump came within inches of losing his life after 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks — despite first being flagged as suspicious more than an hour before the rally — evaded Secret Service and local law enforcement and climbed onto a roof of a nearby building. Crooks fired eight rounds toward the stage before he was killed by a Secret Service sniper. 

A bullet grazed Mr. Trump’s ear, and his Secret Service detail quickly surrounded him. Once the agents received word that Crooks was down, it took them approximately one minute to move Mr. Trump off the stage and to his armored vehicle.

During the extraction, the report said, “upper portions of the former president’s body were visibly exposed for critical seconds during a time when no one knew definitively whether there were additional shooters in his vicinity.”

The panel recommended that the Secret Service retrain its agents on extractions, “emphasizing the necessity of appropriate urgency in extractions and the criticality of ensuring that the protectee is not exposed.”

One rallygoer was killed and two others were wounded. But the report also revealed that seven local law enforcement personnel were injured either from the shooting or their actions during the initial response, and a Secret Service agent was wounded by shrapnel.

The panel said a local law enforcement officer leaving duty first flagged Crooks as suspicious at 4:26 p.m. Crooks was later spotted with a range finder at least half an hour before Mr. Trump took the stage at 6:03 p.m. He was never stopped or interviewed by law enforcement, although there were some failed efforts to locate him. 

“Such an encounter likely would have averted the subsequent sequence of events,” the report said.

While no fewer than nine Secret Service personnel were given information on suspicions about Crooks before the shooting, that information was never passed to Mr. Trump’s detail, the panel said. 

The panel was not charged with reviewing the second assassination attempt against Mr. Trump in which a gunman perched outside of his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, for 12 hours but was identified by a Secret Service agent before he could fire any shots. The panel was briefed on that incident and said the facts “may reinforce” some of its recommendations.

“Two of the most important recommendations involve the necessity of new leadership at the Secret Service and the criticality of re-focusing the Secret Service on its core protective mission,” the report said. 

The Secret Service is currently being run by acting Director Ronald Rowe, a 24-year veteran of the agency, after its permanent director, Kimberly Cheatle, was forced to resign because of the Butler failures. Ms. Cheatle briefly retired as a Secret Service agent before she returned to lead the agency in 2022. 

The panel recommended that the next permanent director come from outside the Secret Service, rather than internal promotion, to provide a new perspective that can help fix the agency’s cultural issues. 

“The events of Butler suggest that there is an urgent need for fresh thinking informed by external experience and perspective,” the report said.

The panel also recommended the Secret Service prioritize its core protective mission, shedding other responsibilities like investigating financial crimes if necessary to maintain that focus. It also called for significant restructuring to improve the chain of command and develop auditing processes to constantly assess and improve protective readiness. 

Mr. Mayorkas has met with the panel and reviewed its report. 

“We will fully consider the panel’s recommendations and are taking the actions needed to advance the Secret Service’s protection mission,” he said in a statement.

Mr. Rowe, in a separate statement, said the agency has already made improvements and is developing a plan for “a fundamental transformation” focused on increasing and retaining personnel, modernizing technology and enhancing training. That plan will retain the agency’s “dual integrated mission of protection and complex investigations,” he said.

The panel members were Mark Filip, deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush; David Mitchell, who served in numerous state and local law enforcement roles in Maryland and Delaware; Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security secretary under President Obama; and Frances Fragos Townsend, Mr. Bush’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism.

Their report is the first completed investigation into the Butler assassination attempt. The Secret Service produced preliminary findings from its internal investigation. House and Senate panels are also investigating the assassination attempts.

While the panel “did not identify any nefarious or malicious intent” behind failures to secure Mr. Trump, it faulted the agency’s overreliance on assigning security based on a protectee’s position rather than risk assessment. 

The report cited a “back-and-forth” between the Trump security detail and Secret Service headquarters regarding how many people were needed to protect him and said the additional security measures taken to protect the former president after the Butler shooting should have been implemented sooner.

The panel found “various Secret Service personnel were read into intelligence regarding a long​-range threat by a foreign state actor against former President Trump” in advance of the rally, but the security plan “was insufficiently responsive” to that information.

The panel also pointed to a “lack of ownership” among senior-level staff for failing to identify security deficiencies and the relative inexperience of two specific agents assigned to key roles. 

“Many of the Secret Service personnel involved in the events of July 13 appear to have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions, or opportunities for improvement,” the report said.

• This article includes wire services reports.