Secret Service Never Picked Up Assigned Radios in Butler

U.S. Secret Service agents never picked up radios that were assigned to them by a local tactical team in Butler, Pennsylvania, adding to the communications woes ahead of the assassination attempt on Republican nominee Donald Trump on July 13.

A Butler County Emergency Services Unit (ESU) commander "personally reminded" USSS countersniper teams on that Friday to pick up the radios at the ESU Command Post RV at the Butler Fairgrounds on the morning of July 13, according to an Aug. 12 report submitted by Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., a member of the congressional task force investigating the assassination attempt.

"The radio comms were properly and perfectly arranged during the extensive pre-mission planning," Higgins wrote. 

Higgins wrote that because Butler County's radio communications were not "interoperable" with the visiting Secret Service, in this case, radios were assigned so that the two agencies could communicate.

So when local police radioed that a man was spotted on a nearby roof on July 13, Secret Service agents never got the warning; countersnipers didn't know until shots rang out from the rifle of Thomas Crooks, CNN reported Friday. In the 15 seconds it took for them to locate and terminate Crooks, he injured Trump and killed a rallygoer. 

"I can confirm that the Butler County ESU team made radios available to the Secret Service and that they were not utilized by the Secret Service," Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said in a statement to CNN. "It is safe to assume that if a holder of an ESU radio was paying attention, they would have received the call."

Exacerbating communications woes is that the Secret Service hasn't adopted a nationwide broadband network that was developed after 9/11, according to CNN. As a result, the Secret Service was relying on cellular service on July 13 in rural western Pennsylvania, already limited bandwidth that was hampered by thousands of rallygoers using their phones. Agents trying to text or receive photos of Crooks were having latency difficulties, CNN reported.

Since July 13, the Secret Service began using its own mobile communications system to create a private cellular network, CNN reported. But that doesn't solve the interoperability problem.

In a statement to CNN, the Secret Service said that quick communications between federal and local agencies is "a complicated undertaking, and it will take a whole of government approach to fix this technical issue, which will require both time and resource investments."

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