Acting Secret Service director admits ‘complacency’ at July Trump rally

Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe admitted a shocking breach of protocol before former President Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.

"There was complacency on the part of others that led to a breach in protocol," Rowe said at a news conference Friday.

Rowe said that those employees "will be held accountable."

"This agency has among the most robust table of penalties in the entirety of the federal government and these penalties will be administered according to our disciplinary process," Rowe said, declining to say what those penalties may look like.

In a report released Friday, the agency described "serious communications failures between the US Secret Service and local law enforcement that made it harder for officers to respond to the attempted assassin."

Law enforcement's failed communications that day have been at the front of criticism targeting the Secret Service in the aftermath of the attempted assassination. The report said that those failures were "especially acute" when warnings about the would-be assassin never made it to Trump's security detail, despite local officers learning of his presence on a nearby roof before any shots were fired.

"A consistent theme gathered from state and local law enforcement personnel who helped secure the Butler rally was the presence of communications deficiencies," the report said. "These deficiencies included gaps in colocation of law enforcement resources to share information, the variety of radio frequencies/channels used... and the capability of agency personnel to clearly convey the Secret Service's protective needs."

One of those deficiencies was that there were "multiple standard conduits of communication that were not in operation on July 13," which, if used, would have increased the likelihood that important information about the threat to Trump could be widely communicated.

The report also said that some of the local law enforcement entities working the rally "had no knowledge that there were two separate communications centers on site."

"As a result, those entities were operating under the misimpression that the Secret Service was directly receiving their radio transmissions," it states.

This story has been updated with additional details.