There has been an ongoing investigation into the security failures that happened in connection with the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. We still don't know the results of that investigation but apparently they don't look good for some members of the Secret Service. At least five agents connected to the failure have been suspended.

At least five members of the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) have been placed on administrative leave following the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Fox News has confirmed.

One member of Trump’s personal protective team and four members of the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh Field Office, including the special agent in charge, have been sidelined nearly six weeks after the incident.

CBS News says this is basically the lowest level of discipline that could be used here. All of these agents are still being paid.

In terms of disciplinary measures, there are different levels corresponding with an official's alleged behavior. When Secret Service personnel are placed on administrative leave for disciplinary reasons, they still collect their paychecks and report to the office. They are typically assigned paperwork or other administrative duties instead of performing their normal day-to-day roles.

Beyond administrative leave, officials disciplined further may be granted a suspension or a suspension without pay, the latter of which typically also revokes their security clearance. That is not the case in this instance. 

CNN published a story this morning offering some details about what went wrong in Butler. Apparently, a set of radios designed to allow local police to communicate with the Secret Service were never used. As a result, the locals weren't able to alert Secret Service snipers when they saw an armed man on the roof.

The day before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a tactical team of local police officers set aside radios for their Secret Service partners so the two agencies could communicate during the former president’s July 13 campaign rally.

But those radios were never picked up.

The next day, three minutes before shots were fired toward Trump, local police radioed that a man was on a nearby roof. That warning never made it to the Secret Service, whose snipers didn’t know the would-be assassin was on the roof until shots rang out. In the 15 seconds it took for snipers to lock onto and kill the shooter, he was able to fire off eight shots...

“I can confirm that the Butler County ESU team made radios available to the Secret Service and that they were not utilized by the Secret Service,” Goldinger said in a statement. While it’s unclear if Secret Service would have gotten the warning about a man on the roof had they picked up the radios, Goldinger said, “It is safe to assume that if a holder of an ESU radio was paying attention, they would have received the call.”

Three minutes is a long time in a situation like this. Snipers could have been on Thomas Crooks before he fired a shot if they'd gotten those messages. Whose responsibility was it to pick up those radios? Why didn't they do it? Beyond that, why didn't the Secret Service have a better system in place to share information?

“Local officials were penned in by a cumbersome hierarchical system of reporting that stymied the flow of urgent information from one unit to the next,” Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa told CNN in a statement. The powerful Republican has spearheaded his own probe into the assassination attempt.

“There was no unified radio channel for all law enforcement on the premises to communicate in the event of an emergency — instead, units connected over various radio channels, group chats and even emails,” Grassley said. “Officers relied heavily on spotty cell service to get their messages through, and were often unsure if the right law enforcement entity received them.”

The counter to this is that the Secret Service uses specially encrypted communication devices to prevent their communications from being listened in on. So there's apparently no easy way to just include the locals in that system. But if that's the case it just brings us back to the radios that were never picked up. If the Secret Service can't make the locals part of their system then they have make sure they become part of the locals' system. The failure to do that in this case almost lead to a historic disaster.