The failed assassination attempt on President Donald Trump at his July 13, 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, is no longer just a national trauma—it’s quickly becoming a national scandal.

Newly released transcripts from a Senate Homeland Security Committee interview suggest a major security failure involving Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). The lead official overseeing protective efforts that day wasn’t a trained Secret Service agent—but rather a JTTF agent with a questionable track record, insufficient preparation, and a memory that seems to fade at all the wrong moments.

Even before this week’s revelations, whistleblowers had warned that the federal agents assigned to protect Trump were barely trained—allegedly receiving little more than a “webinar” before being deployed to one of the highest-stakes security assignments imaginable. Sixteen HSI agents were reportedly sent to the rally, a sharp contrast to their more controversial history: the same agency was accused of embedding twice as many undercover operatives in the crowd on January 6 as the FBI.

And now we know who was leading them.

According to the transcript, the agent in charge admitted under oath that she previously served on the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Squad and had recently transferred from the Phoenix Field Office. But on the day of the Butler rally, she was somehow placed in charge of both leading the HSI “jump team” and handling protective intelligence—despite not being a Secret Service agent.

The most troubling revelations center on the events leading up to the shooting of President Trump.

At approximately 5:45 p.m., the agent said she was notified by her partner that a man with a rangefinder had been spotted outside the rally perimeter—a massive red flag for anyone trained in assassination prevention. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was later confirmed to have used a rangefinder while positioning himself near the AGR building overlooking the rally.

The agent responded by jumping into a golf cart to investigate. But when she encountered a locked gate and a second fence, she “didn’t feel comfortable” proceeding further. So she turned around and left. She told the committee, “Had I been able to go further at that time I would have… I visually inspected the area, and I didn’t see the person.”

It didn’t end there.

The same agent then encountered another officer searching for the suspicious individual. Instead of reinforcing the search near the AGR building, she directed him to look in the opposite direction. That officer wasn’t just any agent—he was the designated counter-sniper response agent. His job was to relay intelligence to rooftop snipers and direct their attention to potential threats.

When asked in the interview if she had, in fact, steered the counter-sniper agent away from the shooter, her response? She “couldn’t recall.”

This wasn’t a one-off slip. It was a series of cascading failures that led directly to President Trump being shot—failures committed by a single government agent in charge of others who had been woefully underprepared. And despite these critical missteps, the agent has not been fired.

To make matters worse, federal officials have been slow-walking accountability. The Biden administration and mainstream media have shown minimal interest in digging into how an assassin got within firing range of the most heavily protected political figure in America—at a rally that had received open threats online beforehand.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has called for a full investigation. “This isn’t just a failure of judgment. This is a systemic failure at the highest levels of federal law enforcement,” Johnson said on Fox News.

Online, the outrage has been building. Twitter and YouTube are flooded with clips pointing out the inconsistencies in the official story and speculating whether the government ignored threats on purpose—or worse, enabled the chaos.

The question now is not whether mistakes were made—it’s whether those mistakes were negligent… or something more. How did an FBI agent with a background in domestic extremism investigations end up steering law enforcement away from an active shooter? Why were HSI agents, rather than Secret Service veterans, tasked with protecting a former and future president?

And why is no one being held accountable?

The American people—especially the millions of voters who support President Trump—deserve answers. Not in a press release or closed-door hearing, but in the full light of day. Because this wasn’t just a security lapse. It was a breach of trust.

And trust, once shattered, is not so easily repaired.