One hundred and two radio transmissions. That is how many times local law enforcement tried to warn the Secret Service about an armed man on a rooftop 155 yards from Donald Trump's stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Not one of those calls reached the protective detail responsible for keeping the former president alive.
A Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report, first detailed by Breitbart News, lays out a cascade of failures so severe that the agency charged with protecting the nation's leaders could not perform its most basic function: listening to the radio.
The findings go well beyond a single miscommunication. They describe an agency that failed to set up a joint communications room with local partners, deployed an inoperable counter-drone system, and staffed a critical operator position with someone who was searching the internet for a rooftop location while bullets were already flying. The result: Thomas Crooks opened fire on Trump and a crowd of rallygoers, and the people whose job it was to stop him never even knew he was there.
Local law enforcement officers first flagged a suspicious person near the rally site at approximately 5:42 p.m., the New York Post reported, citing the DHS Inspector General's findings. That was nearly 30 minutes before Crooks fired his first shots at 6:11 p.m.
Over that half-hour window, local officers sent 102 radio transmissions about the growing threat. The Secret Service heard none of them. The reason was structural: the agency never established a joint communications room with local law enforcement for the Butler event, leaving its personnel unable to monitor the radio channels local officers were using.
What did reach Secret Service personnel during that critical window? Five phone calls and three text messages. That was the sum total of information that filtered through. Even those fragmentary warnings never made it to Trump's protective detail.
The Inspector General's report stated the conclusion bluntly:
"Secret Service decision-makers responsible for protecting President Trump while on stage at the Butler event were not made aware of Crooks' presence at any time."
One detail in the report stands out for its sheer absurdity. A Secret Service counter-drone operator received some indication about the AGR complex rooftop where Crooks had positioned himself. Rather than asking the local law enforcement officers who were already on scene and transmitting warnings, the operator turned to an internet search engine.
The Inspector General's report described what happened next:
"Instead of asking local law enforcement personnel for the AGR complex's location, the counter drone operator searched online for it, and was still searching when Crooks fired his first shots."
The counter-drone system itself was no help. The report confirmed that the system deployed for the Butler rally was inoperable. That failure allowed Crooks to fly a drone over the rally site for nearly nine minutes without detection, giving him an aerial view of the security layout before he climbed onto the roof with a rifle.
The pattern of threats against this president has not slowed since Butler. A foiled drone and sniper attack targeting Trump at a White House UFC event underscored how persistent and varied the danger remains, and how much pressure it places on the very agency now under investigation for systemic breakdowns.
The Butler failures did not occur in isolation. A separate Inspector General report from September 2025, detailed by Just The News, revealed that the Secret Service Counter-Sniper Team operates 73 percent below the staffing level required to meet its mission.
Inspector General Joseph Cufari did not hold back about the stakes:
"The United States Secret Service's Counter-Sniper Team is staffed 73 percent below the level necessary to meet mission requirements. Failure to appropriately staff CS could limit the Secret Service's ability to properly protect our Nation's most senior leaders, risking injury or assassination."
To compensate for the shortfall, the agency burned through nearly a quarter-million overtime hours between 2021 and 2024 and borrowed personnel from other agencies. In some cases, counter-snipers who had not completed mandatory weapons requalification were still deployed to protect the president and other senior officials. Those unqualified marksmen supported 47 of 426 protectee events in calendar year 2024, roughly 11 percent of all assignments.
The staffing crisis raises an uncomfortable question: even if the communications had worked perfectly at Butler, would the Secret Service have had enough trained personnel to act on the warnings?
The Inspector General launched a formal investigation into the Secret Service's security handling at the Butler rally, adding an independent oversight layer to what had already become a full-blown accountability crisis. The Washington Examiner reported that Republicans on the House Homeland Security, Judiciary, and Oversight Committees all requested information from the agency in the aftermath of the shooting.
DHS was accused of slow-walking its responses to those congressional requests and, in some instances, preventing Secret Service officials from cooperating with lawmakers. The stonewalling fueled Republican calls for then-Director Kimberly Cheatle's resignation.
Cheatle resisted those calls in her first public interview after the attack, telling ABC News: "The buck stops with me." She refused to step down, prompting Republicans to threaten to defund her salary and pursue independent investigations. The FBI's intervention to stop a planned attack on the White House UFC event only sharpened questions about whether the Secret Service could handle the threat environment on its own.
The DHS Inspector General's report pulled no punches in its overall assessment, concluding that the Secret Service "missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt" the attack, as Newsmax reported.
What makes the Butler findings so damaging is not any single failure. It is the layering. No joint communications room. An inoperable drone detection system. An operator searching the internet instead of talking to the officers next to him. A counter-sniper corps running on fumes and borrowed bodies. And at the center of it all, a protective detail that was never told a gunman had been spotted on a rooftop with a clear line of fire to the stage.
The threats against Trump have continued well beyond Butler. An armed suspect allegedly targeted Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and an FAA contractor was charged after allegedly emailing a threat to kill the president. Each incident adds weight to the same question the Inspector General's report forces into the open.
Investigators will need to determine whether the systemic breakdowns at Butler have been corrected, whether staffing levels have improved, and whether the agency has implemented the kind of joint communications protocols that could have prevented a gunman from firing eight rounds at a president while 102 warnings went unheard.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether any Secret Service personnel have faced disciplinary action tied specifically to the Inspector General's findings.
An agency that cannot hear 102 radio calls about a man with a rifle on a rooftop does not have a communication problem. It has a competence problem. And until someone with authority treats it like one, the people standing behind those podiums are the ones paying the price.
