One hundred and two. That’s the number of radio transmissions Secret Service personnel failed to receive during the Butler rally on July 13, 2024 — transmissions from local law enforcement warning about a suspicious person with a range finder and a long gun who had taken position on a rooftop with a direct line of sight to the stage where Donald Trump was standing.
One hundred and two warnings. They received five phone calls and three text messages. Thomas Crooks fired eight shots anyway. Corey Comperatore is dead. Trump turned his head at exactly the right moment and survived by a fraction of an inch.
The DHS Inspector General’s 64-page report, released two weeks ago, lays out the catastrophic communication failure in clinical detail. Local law enforcement was sending urgent alerts. The Secret Service wasn’t receiving them. Not because the alerts weren’t being sent — they were, repeatedly, 102 times — but because the agency tasked with protecting the President of the United States had a radio setup that couldn’t receive the transmissions local cops were broadcasting.
Let’s be direct about what this means. This was not a situation where warnings went unheeded. This was a situation where the Secret Service’s own communication infrastructure failed so completely that over a hundred urgent messages about an active threat never reached the agents who needed them. An assassin climbed a roof within 500 feet of a presidential candidate and fired multiple rounds while law enforcement was frantically trying to alert Secret Service personnel who literally couldn’t hear them:
A new inspector general report released two years after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, says the Secret Service missed more than 100 radio transmissions warning about the suspected gunman.
The attack killed firefighter Corey Comperatore as he… pic.twitter.com/WVyqQgn44k
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 13, 2026
Government officials said in a report that during Donald Trump’s 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Secret Service officials failed to receive more than 100 urgent messages about an active shooter.
According to a release from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General on June 30, 2026, the Secret Service failed to carry out and arrange several security measures during Trump’s then-campaign rally for president on July 13, 2024, at the Butler Fairgrounds, which is located around 44 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
According to the report from OIG, the Secret Service only received five phone calls and three text messages about the shooter, who was later identified as Thomas Crooks.
The calls included reports that Crooks had a range finder and a long gun and had taken a position on top of the American Glass Research International complex’s roof.
We already knew a counter-drone operator was Googling the building’s location instead of monitoring his equipment. We already knew a site agent’s common-sense security proposal — using trucks to block the rooftop sightline — was rejected because it would interfere with camera angles. We already knew the lead agent on the ground was relatively inexperienced for an assignment of this magnitude. We already knew the supervisors who approved the security plan were subsequently promoted.
Now we know the radio system didn’t work either.
The question that nobody in a position of authority seems interested in answering is simple: who is actually accountable for any of this? Kimberly Cheatle resigned in disgrace after her performance before Congress. A handful of agents were suspended without pay. Sean Curran — who oversaw the operation at Butler — is now its director.
Suspensions without pay are not accountability when a man is dead, and the President survived by turning his head. Resignations under pressure are not accountability. Promotions for the people who signed off on a security plan riddled with fatal holes are the opposite of accountability.
The Butler IG report confirms what the initial reporting already showed: this failure was total, systematic, and preventable at multiple points. One hundred and two radio warnings. Eight shots fired. One man killed.
Two years later, the people responsible are still employed. Some of them are running the agency.
That is not acceptable. It was never acceptable. And the American people deserve to hear someone in authority say so out loud.
