WASHINGTON (AP) — An independent panel investigating the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally says the Secret Services needs fundamental reform" and that “another Butler can and will happen again” without major changes in how candidates are protected.
The review faulted the Secret Service for poor communications that day and failing to secure the building where the gunman took his shots. It also found more systemic issues at the agency such as a failure to understand the unique risks facing Trump and a culture of doing “more with less.”
The 52-page report issued Thursday recommended bringing in new, outside leadership and refocusing on the Secret Service's protective mission.
“The Secret Service as an agency requires fundamental reform to carry out its mission,” the authors wrote Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of the Homeland Security Department, the Secret Service's parent agency, in a letter accompanying their report. “Without that reform, the Independent Review Panel believes another Butler can and will happen again.”
One rallygoer was killed and two others wounded when Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto the roof of a nearby building and opened fire as Trump spoke. The former president was wounded in the ear before being rushed off the stage by Secret Service agents. That shooting, along with another incident in Florida when Trump was golfing — a gunman there never got a line of site on the president or fired a shot — has led to a crisis in confidence in the agency.
The report by a panel of four former law enforcement officials from national and state government follows investigations by members of Congress, the agency's own investigators and by Homeland Security's oversight body.
The Secret Service said it was making changes.
“We have already significantly improved our readiness, operational and organizational communications and implemented enhanced protective operations for the former president and other protectees,” the agency's acting director Ronald Rowe said in a statement Thursday.
The agency said it was looking at how to retain personnel, modernize technology and bolster training, and was working with Congress to increase funding.
A look at the report's key findings and recommendations:
The panel echoed previous reports that have zeroed in on the failure to secure the building near the rally that had a clear line of site to where Trump was speaking and the multiple communications problems that hindered the ability of the Secret Service and local and state law enforcement to talk to each other.
The panel faulted the planning between Secret Service and the local law enforcement, and said the Secret Service failed to ask about what was being done to secure the building: “Relying on a general understanding that ‘the locals have that area covered’ is simply not good enough and, in fact, at Butler this attitude contributed to the security failure.”
The review questioned why there were two separate command posts at the rally and found other communications problems, including the need to switch radio channels because radio traffic from agents protecting first lady Jill Biden at an event in Pittsburgh was coming across the channels of agents who were with Trump. Also, law enforcement personnel on the ground used a “chaotic mixture” of radio, cell phone, text, and e-mail. And it was unclear who had ultimate command that day.
The report painted a picture of an agency struggling to think critically about how it carries out its mission, especially when it comes to protecting Trump.
The panel said agency personnel operated under the assumption that they effectively had to “do more with less." The report said the additional security measures taken to protect Trump after the Butler shooting should have been taken before.
"To be clear, the Panel did not identify any nefarious or malicious intent behind this phenomenon, but rather an overreliance on assigning personnel based on categories (former, candidate, nominee) instead of an individualized assessment of risk,” the panel wrote.
The panel also noted the “back-and-forth" between the Trump security detail and Secret Service headquarters regarding how many people were needed to protect him.
The panel also faulted some of the senior-level staff who were involved in the rally for what they called a “lack of ownership.” In one example, the panel said a senior agent on site who was tasked with coordinating communications didn't walk around the rally site ahead of time and did not brief the state police counterpart before the rally about how communications would be managed.
It cited the relative inexperience of two specific agents who played a role in security for the July 13 rally. One was the site agent from Trump's detail whose job it was to coordinate with the Pittsburgh field office on security planning for the rally. The panel said the agent graduated from the Secret Service academy in 2020, and had only been on the Trump detail since 2023. Before the Butler rally the agent had only done “minimal previous site advance work or site security planning.”
Another agent assigned to operate a drone detection system had only used the technology at two prior events.
The panel recommended new leadership, specifically from outside the agency, but the report did not say whether anyone should be fired.
Other recommendations included: having a unified command post at all large events; overhead surveillance for all outdoor events; security plans that specify how to mitigate line of site concerns out to 1,000 yards and who's in charge; and more training on how to get protectees out of dangerous scenarios.
The panel said the agency needs renewed focus on its core protective mission while expressing skepticism that the agency should continue with the investigations it currently conducts. While the Secret Service is well known for what it does to protect presidents and other dignitaries, it also investigates financial crimes.
“In the Panel’s opinion, it is simply unacceptable for the Service to have anything less than a paramount focus on its protective mission, particularly while that protective mission function is presently suboptimal," the report said.
Panel members included Janet Napolitano, homeland security secretary under President Barack Obama; 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; and Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush's assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism.
But this is not the first time that an independent review has found fault with the agency. After a man jumped the White House fence and evaded Secret Service to run into the building, a panel a decade ago looked into how the agency protects the White House.
It recommended some of the same changes.
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This story has corrected to reflect that Thomas Crooks' middle name is Matthew, not Michael.
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump reacts following an assassination attempt at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is helped off the stage at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is helped off the stage at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)
Palestinian officials reported at least 28 dead, including four children, in an Israeli strike on a school being used as a shelter in Gaza on Thursday. Nearly 100 people were wounded in the strike in Jabaliya, according to the Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency unit in the north.
The Israeli military said it is looking into whether Hamas’ top leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in a separate military operation in Gaza. Authorities were conducting DNA tests on a body to determine if it is him, an Israeli security official said.
Syria’s military said an Israeli strike early Thursday wounded two civilians and damaged a military post. Israel regularly targets military sites in Syria linked to Iran and to Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group and has escalated its campaign against Hezbollah in recent weeks, after a year of near-daily exchanges of cross-border fire.
Lebanon says more than 2,300 people have been killed in the past year and 77% of public schools are out of service, either due to their use as shelters or their location in areas directly affected by the war.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants blew holes in Israel’s security fence and stormed in, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not distinguish combatants from civilians. The war has destroyed large areas of Gaza and displaced about 90% of its population of 2.3 million people.
Israel’s military says it has allowed 50 trucks of humanitarian aid into northern Gaza on Wednesday, after the United States warned it to boost aid efforts or risk losing weapons funding. The region has suffered heavy destruction and has been completely encircled by Israeli forces for nearly a year.
Here's the latest:
WASHINGTON — The U.S. has imposed sanctions on 18 companies, people and ships across Panama, the Marshall Islands, India and more for their alleged ties to sanctioned Houthi and Iranian financial facilitator Sa’id al-Jamal.
Captains of vessels transporting sanctioned Iranian oil and companies that managed and operated the ships that transported the oil have also been also sanctioned. The Treasury said Thursday that revenue from al-Jamal’s network enables Houthi attacks in the region.
Treasury’s Acting Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Bradley T. Smith says his agency “remains committed to utilizing all available tools to disrupt this key source of illicit revenue that enables the Houthis’ destabilizing activities.”
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Palestinian medical officials say the death toll from an Israeli strike on a school where displaced people were sheltering has risen to 28.
The Israeli military said the strike on Thursday targeted dozens of militants who were meeting inside the school in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency unit in the north, said the death toll had climbed to 28, with another 98 people wounded.
Israel has been waging a large military operation in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp dating back to the 1948 war, for more than a week now. It has once again called on all residents of northern Gaza to flee south, and it allowed no food aid to enter the north for around two weeks at the start of the month.
Its forces have repeatedly returned to Jabaliya and other areas of Gaza after saying that militants had regrouped there.
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine government has evacuated dozens of Filipino workers from Lebanon, including one who urged thousands of compatriots to leave the war-hit nation before it’s too late.
The 45 Filipino workers and two children who arrived Thursday in the Philippine capital were a fraction of about 10,000 to 11,000 Filipinos, many of whom have refused to leave their jobs in Lebanon for their poverty-stricken homeland.
“I hope they would return home because it has become too dangerous there,” Felicilda Aboc, a 56-year-old who has worked for 18 years as a house helper in Lebanon, told reporters at Manila’s international airport. She recounted how a powerful blast two days ago shook the house where she worked.
The Philippine government has offered free chartered flights, cash and new livelihood training to encourage Filipinos in Lebanon to return home but has yet to issue a mandatory evacuation order.
“I was told that even if the bombs are in front of them, they may not go home as long as they still have employers,” Philippine Foreign Undersecretary Eduardo de Vega said of the many Filipinos in Lebanon.
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military says it is looking into whether Hamas’ top leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in a military operation in Gaza.
The military said in a statement Thursday that three militants were killed during operations in Gaza, without elaborating. It said the identities of the three were so far not confirmed, but it was “checking the possibility” that one of the three was Sinwar.
Sinwar was one of the chief architects of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. He was chosen as the group’s top leader following the assassination of Ismael Haniyeh in July in an apparent Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran.
BERLIN — The German military says a German navy ship deployed to the U.N. peacekeeping mission off the Lebanese coast has intercepted and brought down a drone.
The military said a defense system on board the corvette, the Ludwigshafen am Rhein, brought the drone down in the water around 5 a.m. Thursday and that the drone’s explosive load detonated in the process.
It said it did not know where the drone came from. The military didn’t specify the location of the ship at the time of the incident.
The Ludwigshafen am Rhein is currently participating in the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon. Germany also has soldiers at the mission’s headquarters in Naqoura.
OSLO, Norway — Norway's foreign ministry says the Norwegian Embassy in Beirut has been evacuated after receiving a “bomb threat.” No one has been injured.
A spokeswoman said Thursday that the few Norwegian diplomats in Beirut are all safe.
“The acts of war in Lebanon make the security situation very unpredictable and tense. This threat is another example of that,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ragnhild Simenstad said.
“The Foreign Ministry is continuously assessing the situation, including the safety of our colleagues who work in Beirut. The embassy has already implemented measures, as we have routines for in situations like this."
An Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in northern Gaza on Thursday killed at least 15 people, including four children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had gathered at the school.
The strike hit the Abu Hussein school in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza where Israel has been waging a major air and ground operation for more than a week.
This item has been corrected to show four children were confirmed dead in the strike, not five.
Read more here.
BEIRUT — A Hezbollah official says the aim of the group’s military command is to keep fighting “with all available means” to prevent Israel from achieving its goals and to eventually agree on a cease-fire.
Legislator Hassan Fadlallah told reporters Thursday that since Israel’s invasion began on Oct. 1, Israeli troops have not captured any villages.
Fadlallah says his group's aim is to stop the war, but he refused to go into details except to say Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker and caretaker prime minister are leading the efforts.
“Our goal today is to end the aggression. We will not go into any detail related to the mechanism or solutions,” he said, when asked whether Hezbollah still insists that it will only stop fighting once Israel’s offensive on Gaza stops.
Fadlallah says Israel has not been able to push deeper into Lebanon, stop Hezbollah rocket fire or create the conditions for its citizens to return to communities in the north near the border, which Israel says is its main war aim.
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Palestinian medical officials say an Israeli strike on a tent camp in the Gaza Strip killed three men and wounded eight other people, including women and children.
The bodies were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah after the strike on Thursday. An Associated Press reporter counted the bodies.
There has been no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The military says it carries out precise strikes on militants who shelter among civilians, putting them in danger.
Hamas-led militants triggered the war when they stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.
CAIRO — Iran’s foreign minister has paid a rare visit to Egypt to discuss regional tensions linked to Israel’s war with Iran-allied groups in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
Abbas Araghchi met with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi and other top officials on Thursday to discuss how to de-escalate tensions, according to an Egyptian statement.
Egypt was the first Arab country to make peace with Israel and is a close U.S. ally. Araghchi visited Jordan, another close U.S. ally, on Wednesday.
Israel has vowed to respond to an Iranian ballistic missile attack earlier this month, raising fears of a regionwide war that could draw in the U.S. and its allies.
Egypt and Jordan have repeatedly called for a cease-fire in Gaza, and Egypt has been a key mediator between Israel and Hamas.
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military says it has killed a local Hezbollah commander in a southern Lebanese town near the border.
The military said Thursday that an airstrike on Bint Jbeil killed Hussein Awada, who it said was in charge of firing projectiles into Israel from areas near the town.
Israeli strikes in recent weeks have killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and most of his senior commanders.
Also Thursday, the Israeli military warned people to stay away from two buildings in the eastern villages of Saraaine and Tamnine, in the Bekaa Valley, where Israel has carried out scores of airstrikes over the past two weeks.
TEHRAN, Iran — The chief of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard has threatened Israel with more missile barrages if it strikes Iran.
“Do not repeat your mistake — if you misbehave, if you strike anything of ours either in the region or in Iran, we will again hit you painfully,” Gen. Hossein Salami said Thursday during a funeral ceremony for Iranian Guard commander Abbas Nilforoushan, who was killed alongside the head of the Hezbollah militant group in Beirut in September.
Salami says an Iranian missile barrage on Israel earlier in October in retaliation for killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Nilforoushan was the “tiniest” action by Iran. He says an air defense battery deployed to Israel by the U.S. will not prevent Iranian retaliation.
“We do know about your weakness, and you know too,” Salami said.
Iran is the main backer of Hezbollah and supports militant groups opposed to Israel across the region, including Hamas.
DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria’s military says Israel carried out a strike early Thursday in the coastal city of Latakia, wounding two civilians and damaging a military post.
The military statement that was carried by state media did not give further details.
Israel regularly targets military sites in Syria linked to Iran and to Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group. Those strikes have become more frequent after exchanges of fire along the Lebanon-Israel border began in October 2023, with Hezbollah attacking Israeli posts in support of the Palestinians and its ally, Hamas.
The exchanges intensified over the past three weeks, and on Oct. 1, Israel began a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Long-range American B-2 stealth bombers have launched airstrikes targeting underground bunkers used by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, officials said.
It wasn’t immediately clear what damage was done in the strikes early Thursday.
However, there have been no previous reports of the B-2 Spirit being used in the strikes targeting the Houthis, who have been attacking ships for months in the Red Sea corridor over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
The Houthis’ al-Masirah satellite news channel reported airstrikes around Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, which the group has held since 2014. They also reported strikes around the Houthi stronghold of Saada. They offered no immediate information on damage or casualties.
United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the B-2 bombers targeted “five hardened underground weapons storage locations in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.”
The strike also appeared to be an indirect warning to Iran, the Houthis’ main benefactor, which has targeted Israel with ballistic missile attacks twice over the past year. The nuclear-capable B-2, which first saw action in 1999 in the Kosovo War, is rarely used by the U.S. military in combat as each aircraft is worth some $1 billion.
Felicilda Aboc, who has worked for 18 years as a house helper in Lebanon's northern Tripoli city, gestures as she answers questions from reporters upon her arrival at Manila's International Airport, Philippines, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)
In this photo released by U.S. Air National Guard, a U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber takes off from a Royal Australian Air Force base in Amberley, Australia, Sept. 11, 2024. U.S. long-range B-2 stealth bombers launched airstrikes early Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, targeting underground bunkers used by Yemen's Houthi rebels, officials said. (Staff Sgt. Whitney Erhart/U.S. Air National Guard via AP)
Damage to a home struck by a rocket fired from Lebanon in the town of Majd al-Krum , northern Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
A member of Israeli security forces surveys damage to a home struck by a rocket fired from Lebanon in the town of Majd al-Krum, northern Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
Israeli security forces survey damage to a home struck by a rocket fired from Lebanon in the town of Majd al-Krum, northern Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
The cross atop of Our Lady of Hadath Church appears in front of Beirut's Dahiyeh suburb, background, that remains in darkness after Israeli airstrikes, Lebanon, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
