DHS Inspector General: Secret Service Failed to Secure Mobile Devices Before the Butler Assassination Attempt

What the OIG Found

The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General published a report this week concluding that the U.S. Secret Service failed to effectively secure and manage mobile devices used during protective operations. The finding emerged from the wider review triggered by the July 13, 2024 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a bullet grazed President Donald Trump's right ear.

According to the OIG report, Secret Service employees frequently used personal cell phones to conduct official government business. That practice, the office said, created a window for adversaries to intercept and exploit sensitive communications, a risk the report described as particularly acute when those unsecured devices were carried abroad.

The OIG's own language is blunt: "adversaries could have intercepted and exploited Secret Service information, placing at risk our Nation's leaders, other protectees, and employees."

Why Agents Were Using Personal Phones

The report does not describe the problem as laziness or disregard. It identifies a structural failure: the Secret Service's process for identifying and deploying mobile device capabilities did not consistently account for what agents actually needed in the field. When official devices lacked necessary functionality, agents defaulted to personal phones.

Additionally, the OIG found the Secret Service had no established policy requiring security testing of mobile app code before installation on agency devices. Its processes for securing devices used internationally were also deemed insufficient.

A protection detail operating overseas with unsecured personal devices is a counterintelligence problem, the kind foreign intelligence services routinely exploit.

Five Recommendations, Full Concurrence

The OIG issued five recommendations aimed at reducing reliance on unmanaged personal devices and tightening mobile security protocols. The Secret Service concurred with all five, according to the report.

Concurrence does not equal completion. Whether those recommendations have been implemented, partially implemented, or are still in progress is not addressed in the source material reviewed for this article.

Context: The Butler Attack

Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire near the Butler Farm Show on July 13, 2024. The FBI confirmed his identity that day. Secret Service officers shot and killed Crooks at the scene.

In a statement not long after the attempt on his life, Trump thanked the Secret Service and police for their response and said, "Most importantly, I want to extend my condolences to the family of the person at the Rally who was killed, and also to the family of another person that was badly injured."

The Butler shooting triggered multiple parallel reviews. In December 2024, according to Breitbart News, a congressional task force on the attempted assassination released its final report, finding failures in the planning, execution, and leadership of the Secret Service. The mobile device failures documented in the OIG report are a separate thread of that broader accountability process.

The Strongest Counterpoint

A fair concern worth raising: attribution of blame for these systemic failures is not straightforward. The Secret Service has long faced resource constraints, high agent turnover, and an expanding protective mission that now covers far more principals than it did a generation ago. Critics of the agency argue that pointing to mobile device policy as a security gap, while valid, risks obscuring the harder organizational and funding problems that made Butler possible. If agents lack properly equipped government devices, that is partly a procurement and budget failure that precedes any individual director's tenure.

That argument has merit as a policy matter. It does not, however, change what the OIG documented. The risk was real, it was known after Butler, and the agency did not have adequate controls in place.

Where This Stands as of June 27, 2026

The Breitbart report, which is the sole published source for the OIG's specific findings reviewed here, does not include a response from current Secret Service leadership or detail a timeline for implementing the five recommendations. The OIG report itself was published earlier this week.

The unresolved question is compliance. The Secret Service agreed with the recommendations, but independent verification of whether corrective actions have been completed or are still pending has not yet appeared in publicly available reporting.