US Secret Service failures before Donald Trump rally shooting ‘preventable’ – Senate panel

Investigators found that there was no clear chain of command among the Secret Service and other security agencies and no plan for coverage of the building where the gunman climbed up to fire the shots

Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump is bundled away after the shooting at a campaign rally in July (Evan Vucci/AP)

Multiple Secret Service failures ahead of the July rally for former US president Donald Trump where a gunman opened fire were “foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt that day”, according to a bipartisan Senate investigation released on Wednesday.

Similar to the agency’s own internal investigation and an ongoing bipartisan House probe, the interim report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found multiple failures on almost every level ahead of the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting, including in planning, communications, security and allocation of resources.