Secret Service agents knew Thomas Crooks had a rifle and had made his way onto a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania with a clear shot at Donald Trump — and never issued a word to the president’s own protective detail.
Those details were revealed in a damning new report released Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.
According to the report, the Secret Service missed multiple opportunities to detect, prevent, and disrupt Thomas Crooks’s attempted assassination of Trump during the July 13 episode in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign.
The report details that local law enforcement notified the Secret Service of a ‘suspicious person’ on the roof at 6:09 pm. Trump was shot at eight times at 6:11 pm.
‘The Secret Service’s overall lack of policy and processes coupled with limited intelligence sharing and poor collaboration and communication with protectee staff and state and local law enforcement set the conditions that led to missing opportunities to prevent and detect the attempted assassination,’ the OIG report said.
The OIG report is based on 92 interviews, more than 70,000 documents, and a 3D model used used to reconstruct the event site and to identify the locations of individuals before, during, and after the shooting.
It found that the Secret Service failed to detect Crooks’s drone flight used to view the campaign event stage – citing both an under-trained operator, who had received just 20 minutes of informal training – as well as a broken ethernet cable that was fixed roughly one half-hour after Crooks had already flown his drone over the site, undetected.
The report also revealed that Trump’s own campaign staff refused to let agents park trucks blocking the shooter’s sightline because they’d be ‘too close to [President Trump’s] press shot.’
That was one of many damning revelations made in the report, which also faulted the lack of formal communications established with local law enforcement, thereby depriving them of additional communications regarding Crooks, as well as a lack of communications and intelligence sharing with leadership in the Pittsburgh Field Office.
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Orthodox Jew fights back, says California city fined him for home prayer meetings
A California rabbi is threatening legal action after he says the city of Irvine has unlawfully fined him for months for hosting private prayer meetings in his home.
First Liberty Institute sent a demand letter to the city of Irvine on June 12 demanding the city immediately cease its enforcement actions and revoke past citations against its client, Rabbi Rafi Dadon.
Dadon, an Orthodox Jew, regularly invites friends to his home for prayer, Torah study, and Shabbat and holiday meals. His attorneys say these gatherings are private, by invitation only and central to his faith.
First Liberty attorney Ryan Gardner told Fox News Digital that Dadon has been fined approximately $5,000 since the city began fining him in August 2025.
According to the letter sent by Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and First Liberty Institute, the city’s justifications for the fines have frequently changed.
The city initially claimed that Dadon was engaging in unpermitted “Church activities” that required a Conditional Use Permit, under local zoning regulations. Later, officials dropped the reference to “Church activities” and alleged Dadon was violating zoning rules related to “Accessory Use” and “commercial activity” and suggested his home was operating as a “place of worship,” according to the demand letter.
“The City’s shifting and inconsistent characterization of Rabbi Dadon’s activities… raises serious concerns that the enforcement action is pretextual and directed not at any neutrally applied land-use issue, but rather at protected religious exercise,” the demand letter states.
The letter suggests the city could be violating the Free Exercise Clause, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) and the Fair Housing Act with its actions and says it must preserve any documents and communications related to the matter in anticipation of potential legal action.
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Iran Runs Into Big Problem: No Buyers For Its Oil, As Full Tankers Pile Up Off China
Iran was euphoric when as part of the Trump MOU, it got permission to flood the world with its oil after Trump effectively eliminate sanctions that had been in place for 40 years. However, it has quickly run into another, potentially far bigger problem: as the armada of Iranian oil tankers exits the Persian Gulf, it is now struggling to find buyers before the expiry of a 60-day window granted by Washington,
According to Vortexa data and Bloomberg calculations, there are more than 58 million barrels of Iranian crude and condensate was on-the-water as of July 1, yet more than 90% has no clear destination. The vessels are either indicating “for orders” or Singapore as their next port of call, a sign they may conduct ship-to-ship transfers in the Malacca Strait.
A failure to quickly sell the crude will not only deprive Tehran of much-needed revenue, but more importantly, will weaken its hand in the ongoing negotiations with Washington. The Islamic Republic has until mid-August to find buyers after the US lifted sanctions on the oil in the middle of June and ended a blockade of Iranian ports, part of an interim peace deal.
And here is the culprit : demand from Chinese independent refiners – Iran’s main customers prior to the conflict – has been muted as the sector’s run rates crash to a nine-year low. China’s state-owned refiners have also stayed on the sidelines, citing concerns over the ability of banks to finance any deals.
Translation: as we suspected a month ago, China’s economy is in far worse shape than telegraphed, and as a result it does not need Iranian oil (what oil it does need it just sources from its massive strategic reserves).
In Early June we said that confirming our recent reporting on China’s oil demand collapse, crude oil imports to China in May fell to their lowest since October 2017 because of the price spike resulting from the Persian Gulf tanker traffic disruption, plunging refinery margins (due to price ceilings imposed by Beijing), of a slowing economy and the rapid slowdown in the economy.
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