Report: Threat made to Trump’s life before Butler County shooting
The office of U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a report Saturday, July 12, that states senior-level U.S. Secret Service were aware of a threat to President Donald Trump’s life just 10 days before he was shot in Butler County.
According to a news release by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the report concluded that Secret Service officials failed to relay the information to federal and local law enforcement personnel responsible for securing and staffing the rally for then candidate Trump at the Butler Farm Show grounds on July 13, 2024.
“The Secret Service had no process to share classified threat information with partners when the information was not considered an imminent threat to life,” the report determined.
The report gave eight recommendations to improve functionality of the Secret Service, including a recommendation for the agency to proactively share threat information among its personnel and law enforcement partners.
According to the report, on July 3, 2024, one day after the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh field office was made aware of the upcoming rally, high-level Secret Service officials were briefed on a classified threat to Trump.
The report found senior members of the Donald Trump Protective Division and the lead advance agent for site security were made aware of the threat, but other members of the advance team were not.
The report outlines further failures of the Secret Service, such as a lack of clear roles for personnel, an improper allocation of assets and technological failures.
“As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdictional oversight over the Secret Service, I’m committed to working closely with the agency to ensure they’re properly equipped to repair what’s broken,” Grassley said. “As an important step, I allocated $1.17 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill to provide the Secret Service with additional funding. I’m hopeful this significant injection of resources will go a long way in bringing the agency up to speed.”
Grassley requested a Government Accountability Office audit on July 25, 2024 — less than two weeks after the shooting that took one life and left several others, including Trump, injured.
The Government Accountability Office is the U.S. government’s primary auditor and is a nonpartisan, wholly independent legislative branch agency.
According to the release, the audit was conducted over the course of nearly a year, from August 2024 to July 2025, and is the longest review of the attempted assassination in Butler that has been completed to date.
