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Technologies that may have derailed the former president because they were implemented inappropriately or because the Secret Service decided not to use them.
By Eric Lipton and David A. Fahrenthold
Reporting from Washington
After a week of carelessness and failures, the officials who accompanied former President Donald J. Trump at a crusade in Butler, Pennsylvania, still had one last chance to get it right. The instance lasted about 30 seconds.
It all happened when a local police officer looked over the roof of the AGR International warehouse near the protest site and spotted the suspicious guy he and other officials were chasing. Ninety minutes of confusion over the intentions and whereabouts of Thomas Crooks ended in an instant.
“Long gun!” the officer broadcast on the police radio system, according to Secret Service testimony before Congress this week.
It was urgent news that immediately reached a command center shared by local police and the Secret Service, and then agents close enough to sell their bodies in front of Trump. They still had time to thwart an assassination attempt.
But the radio message reached the Secret Service and 30 seconds later, Crooks fired his first shots.
This communications breakdown is one of many instances where technologies that could have protected Trump from the July 13 shootings failed to do so, either because they malfunctioned or because they were misused. deployed, or because the secret facilities did not use them in the first place.
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