Six Secret Service agents have been suspended without pay following a bombshell investigation into the near assassination of President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally last July, the agency confirmed Wednesday.
Matt Quinn, the Secret Service’s deputy director, stated that the agents received suspensions ranging from 10 to 42 days of unpaid leave and were assigned to restricted roles with reduced responsibility upon their return to duty.
“Secret Service is totally accountable for Butler,” Quinn said. “Butler was an operational failure and we are focused today on ensuring that it never happens again.”
The suspensions came four days before the one-year anniversary of the July 13, 2024 shooting incident in Butler, Pennsylvania, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on the rally stage from a nearby rooftop less than 400 yards away.
One of Crooks’ bullets grazed President Trump’s ear during the attack. Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old firefighter and father standing behind Trump was killed while two other men in the audience were seriously wounded by gunfire. Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper.
The disciplinary actions were issued in recent months in accordance with a federally mandated process, and the agents were given the right to appeal. The positions of those suspended ranged from supervisory level to line agent level.
Quinn said the agency “weren’t going to fire [their] way out of this” but instead are “laser focused on fixing the root cause of the problem.”
The near assassination triggered widespread criticism of the Secret Service’s security protocols and led to the resignation of then-Director Kimberly Cheatle, who stepped down 10 days after the shooting.
An independent review by the Department of Homeland Security found that the Secret Service made major mistakes that left the president vulnerable, and uncovered systemic issues within the organization and concluded that “another Butler can and will happen again” without serious reforms.
“The Secret Service does not perform at the elite levels needed to discharge its critical mission,” the report found. “The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved.”
A bipartisan House task force released a 180-page report in December stating that the Butler incident was “preventable,” citing “preexisting” leadership and training issues that “created an environment” where security failures were possible.