Secret Service Still Trying to Deflect Blame for Trump Assassination Failures on Local Law Enforcement Agencies

“Multiple law enforcement entities involved in securing the rally questioned” the location of a local team of snipers that had positioned itself in the warehouse area, but without a clear view of the rooftops, the [Secret Service] report stated. “Yet there was no follow-up discussion about modifying their position,” it said.

Local law enforcement officials have said in interviews with The Times that Secret Service agents who were charged with planning for the rally never specified where they should be located, leaving them to make their own decisions. Secret Service countersnipers who were deployed to the event based on heightened threats against Mr. Trump were tasked with assessing the landscape and positioning themselves in strategic places to detect a would-be sniper at high points with a clear shot of Mr. Trump. But no one was posted on the rooftop from which Mr. Crooks eventually lay prone with his rifle.

The presence of two command posts rather than one, and the fact that the Secret Service and local law enforcement were operating on two different radio frequencies, was also problematic, the report found.

Some local police teams, the report said, “had no knowledge that there were two separate communications centers on site” and as a result were “operating under a misimpression that the Secret Service was directly receiving their radio transmissions.”

But it is not clear which local agencies the Secret Service is referring to. The Times interviewed several local officials who knew of the separate command centers and said they were not invited to the Secret Service’s security room, which would have resolved the issue of different radio frequencies.

— Eileen Sullivan and Kate Kelly in Communication Failures Plagued Deadly Trump Rally, Secret Service Finds