Assassination attempt on Trump was preventable: House report

WASHINGTON – The US House task force on the attempted assassinations of former president Donald Trump released its first preliminary report on Oct 21, chastising the Secret Service for poor planning and a communications breakdown that resulted in a fatal shooting at Trump's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

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“Put simply, the evidence obtained by the task force to date shows the tragic and shocking events of July 13 were preventable and should not have happened,” the report said.

The bipartisan report is based on 23 interviews with local law enforcement officials who assisted with security at the rally, thousands of pages of documents from the local, state and federal authorities, and testimony from the task force's public hearing on Sept 26.

Its findings largely hew to the conclusions of three other recent investigations.

A Senate inquiry found that no one was in charge of planning and security decisions for the July 13 campaign rally where Trump was shot. An independent panel reviewing the failures that led to the attempted assassination called on the Secret Service to replace its leadership with people from the private sector and focus almost exclusively on its protective mission.

And the Secret Service's own internal investigation found that complacency had set in among some of the agents charged with securing the rally site.