A preliminary report by the House Task Force on the attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump provides new detail about the lack of coordination between the Secret Service and state and local law enforcement officers that contributed to Trump nearly being killed and the murder of rally-goer Corey Comperatore.
The report, released early Monday, also asserts that a local law enforcement officer said he fired at shooter Thomas Crooks before the Secret Service counter sniper fired the shot that killed him, and that this first shot may have caused Crooks to stop shooting.
But House Task Force investigators concluded that the order of the shots remains unclear. Crooks’ autopsy shows that only one bullet entered Crooks’ head and credits the Secret Service counter sniper for firing that shot, the report states.
Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appointed the task force, headed by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania and Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, in late July. As part of its ongoing investigation, the panel interviewed 23 state and local law enforcement witnesses, received a series of Secret Service briefings, and obtained thousands of pages of documentation in response to federal, state, and local agencies.
Many of its findings are similar to those of the interim joint report by two Senate panels, which released their initial findings in late September, and a bipartisan Independent Review Board, which unveiled its findings and recommendations last week.
But a section on “fragmented lines of communication and unclear lines of communication and chains of command” provides new detail about the failures that led to no law enforcement officer engaging with Crooks until he was on a rooftop only 200 yards from Trump and the crowd. It also provides more information about why the threat Crooks posed was not communicated to the innermost ring of Secret Service agents protecting the former president on the stage so they could remove the candidate from the dais before Crooks opened fire.
One law enforcement officer from the Butler Emergency Services Unit stationed inside the American........