The Secret Service has quietly suspended six agents without pay for their roles in last year’s assassination attempt on President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The agents, including both supervisors and field-level officers for the Secret Service, received suspensions ranging from 10 to 42 days but were not terminated, according to Fox News.
According to agency leaders, the decision reflects what they described as a systemic failure rather than individual misconduct during the assassination attempt.
The suspensions, which took place in February but were only recently confirmed, come ahead of a long-awaited Senate report expected to detail security lapses that took place during the day of the shooting.
The Butler attack, which left firefighter Corey Comperatore dead and narrowly missed killing Trump, sent shockwaves across the country and sparked bipartisan outrage over federal security failures. Trump was injured when a bullet grazed his ear, and two others were wounded before the gunman, Thomas Crooks, was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn told CBS, “We aren’t going to fire our way out of this. We’re going to focus on the root cause and fix the deficiencies that put us in that situation.”
Renewed focus on investigating what happened that day in Butler has come up since Trump’s re-election, especially after a bipartisan House task force declared the attack “preventable” and blamed leadership and training failures for creating a dangerous environment at the rally.
Adding to concerns, the Secret Service faced additional criticism just weeks after the shooting, when another attempt on Trump’s life in Florida was narrowly averted at Mar-A-Lago, resulting in the resignation of then-Director Kimberly Cheatle, as previously covered by DX.
In the wake of the Butler shooting, the agency claims to have revamped its tactics, introducing military-grade drones and new mobile command centers to improve field communications.