Secret Service knew Thomas Crooks was on roof TWO MINUTES before he shot Trump, bombshell intelligence report reveals

Secret Service agents knew Thomas Crooks had a rifle and had made his way onto a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania with a clear shot at Donald Trump — and never issued a word to the president’s own protective detail. 

Those details were revealed in a damning new report released Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General. 

According to the report, the Secret Service missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt Thomas Crooks’s attempted assassination of Trump during the July 13 episode in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign.

The report details that local law enforcement notified the Secret Service of a ‘suspicious person’ on the roof at 6:09 pm. Trump was shot at eight times at 6:11 pm. 

‘The Secret Service’s overall lack of policy and processes coupled with limited intelligence sharing and poor collaboration and communication with protectee staff and state and local law enforcement set the conditions that led to missing opportunities to prevent and detect the attempted assassination,’ the OIG report said.

The OIG report is based on 92 interviews, more than 70,000 documents, and a 3D model used used to reconstruct the event site and to identify the locations of individuals before, during, and after the shooting.

It found that the Secret Service failed to detect Crooks’s drone flight used to view the campaign event stage – citing both an under-trained operator, who had received just 20 minutes of informal training – as well as a broken ethernet cable that was fixed roughly one half-hour after Crooks had already flown his drone over the site, undetected. 

The report also revealed that Trump’s own campaign staff refused to let agents park trucks blocking the shooter’s sightline because they’d be ‘too close to [President Trump’s] press shot.’

That was one of many damning revelations made in the report, which also faulted the lack of formal communications established with local law enforcement, thereby depriving them of additional communications regarding Crooks, as well as a lack of communications and intelligence sharing with leadership in the Pittsburgh Field Office. 

Secret Service agents knew Thomas Crooks (left and right) had a rifle and had made his way onto a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania with a clear shot at Donald Trump — and never issued a word to the president’s own protective detail 

Donald Trump is seen with blood on his face surrounded by Secret Service agents as he is taken off the stage at a campaign event at Butler Farm Show Inc. in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024 

Crooks, 20, was shot dead after attempting to kill the now-President at a rally in 2024

Trump’s ear was shot in the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024

The lack of coordinated communications with state and local law enforcement would also prove deeply damaging.

In total, the report says, the Secret Service did not receive 102 radio transmissions sent by local law enforcement officers in a separate communications room in the run-up to the attempted assassination.

Instead, the report says, Secret Service received only five phone calls and three text messages about a suspicious person, who was later identified to be Crooks, during that period.

They also never received three transmissions from local law enforcement officers that the suspect in question had a long gun. 

Fireworks explode during UFC Freedom 250, on the South Lawn of the White House

President Donald Trump holds a meeting in the Situation Room of the White House. A newly unredacted report sheds light on the communications and security failures that left then-candidate Trump vulnerable to an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024 

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is seen following recent renovations 

‘The limited communication regarding the suspicious person … did not create a sense of urgency for Secret Service members to report this information to President Trump’s protective detail,’ the report concludes.

In total, the OIG report made seven recommendations for the Secret Service to improve its processes for securing events. 

The unredacted report comes just weeks after gunshots were fired at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC, and after FBI Director Kash Patel announced a series of arrests made in connection with an alleged UFC attack plot at the White House.

Reports of the UFC investigation appeared to catch the Secret Service, which assisted the FBI in leading the investigation, off guard. 

It also comes as the nation’s capital, and commander-in-chief, prepare to host Americans from across the country for the nation’s 250th anniversary. 

The Daily Mail has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and the White House for comment.   

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