The US Secret Service has “deep flaws” that need to be addressed urgently or we will see another assassination attempt like the one at Donald Trump’s rally, a damning report says. .
The independent commission tasked with investigating the July 13 mass shooting released its findings Thursday, saying the organization had become “bureaucratic, complacent and static.”
The 52-page report called for a review of leadership and said “a number of specific failures and breakdowns” enabled the attack on the Republican presidential nominee.
The Secret Service has already acknowledged its failures, and its director resigned weeks after the shooting.
The agency’s acting director, Ronald Lowe, said in a statement Thursday that the agency will carefully review the new report.
“We have already significantly improved our readiness, operational and organizational communications, and implemented enhanced protection operations for the former president,” he said.
In the report, drafted by state and national law enforcement officials, the commission praised the investigators who risk their lives to protect many of the nation’s highest-ranking officials, but some He also cited leadership and cultural failures.
These included a “troublesome lack of critical thinking” among staff and a reluctance to “speak up”.
The report said the agency’s problems were “systemic or cultural” and called for “fundamental reforms”, including removing some of its top leadership “as soon as possible".
“Without that reform… another deacon can and will happen again,” the committee wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who oversees the organization.
President Joe Biden ordered a bipartisan review of the protection agency after a gunman tried to assassinate Trump by firing from a nearby rooftop at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired eight shots into the rally, killing one man and leaving President Trump bleeding from his ear. The Secret Service shot the crooks dead.
On Thursday, the committee called for “mandatory monitoring of all outdoor events with overhead technology.”
In September, another gunman was found near the former president outside the Trump International Golf Course in Palm Beach, Florida.
Police arrested Trump after they noticed the tip of a rifle stuck in some shrubbery a few hundred meters away from him on the golf course.
