WASHINGTON >> No one was in charge of planning and security decisions for the July 13 campaign rally where GOP presidential candidate former President Donald Trump was shot, according to a preliminary report released Wednesday by a Senate committee that described a withering list of Secret Service failings.

Trump was injured after a bullet grazed his ear, but a member of the audience was fatally shot.

Diffuse and blurred leadership roles for the event in Butler, Pa., led to communications breakdowns and security lapses, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee found. There was confusion over who was supposed to secure the building from which the gunman opened fire. There were multiple plans in place, none of them definitive. There were urgent warnings that were picked up but then dropped.

The report painted a portrait of hapless on-site leadership unaware of potential threats to Trump’s safety and a culture within the agency of individuals unwilling to take responsibility for those failures. Even after many hours of testimony, the committee said that no one involved in the rally’s security plans could say who made the call to exclude from the security perimeter a set of nearby warehouses, one of which the gunman eventually climbed onto and used as a perch to shoot at Trump.

“Everybody points fingers at someone else,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the top Republican on the panel, said in remarks to reporters Tuesday.

The committee report also describes an agency struggling with the basics of operating technology to do its job, with agents who had faulty radios and nonfunctioning drone-detection devices. An agent with only three months’ training on the drone equipment could not get it to work and turned to calling a toll-free tech support hotline “to start troubleshooting with the company,” which took several hours.

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., the committee’s chair, stressed the panel would continue digging into the 2,800 pages of documents obtained from law enforcement and pushing for more interviews before issuing a final report. The interim report details multiple information requests that have yet to be answered.

“These problems, unfortunately, continue to remain unaddressed, and that must change,” Peters said.

In a statement, the Secret Service spokesperson, Anthony Guglielmi, said many of the Senate findings were in line with the agency’s internal review.

“The weight of our mission is not lost on us,” Guglielmi said. He said the agency would continue to cooperate with Senate investigators, though some of the senators leading the inquiry have said the agency had not provided crucial material despite their requests.

Multiple failures

Many aspects of the report largely echoed the findings of an investigation by The New York Times that noted disorganized communications, dropped security warnings and a lack of personnel as contributors to the assassination attempt. But the committee’s work added new detail, testimony and findings.

The Secret Service had “credible intelligence” of a threat to Trump before he took the stage for the rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds, but the agency failed to take the necessary steps to stop an attempt on his life, the report found.

Before the gunman, Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., climbed atop the warehouse, the Secret Service had identified the building as a potentially vulnerable area. But it left the roof nevertheless unmanned. Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper shortly after the shooting.

Technology breakdowns also hurt the agency that day. Radio communications were hampered by technical failures that rendered some devices inoperable. One agent was so busy trying to fix his own radio that he failed to pick up the local police radio he had been offered. Had he grabbed that radio, he would have heard the local police traffic describing a suspicious person, who turned out to be Crooks, in real time.

And Secret Service site leadership was largely out of the loop as critical security information was picked up by front-line officers.

Among those interviewed for the 94-page document was the lead Secret Service counter sniper, unnamed in the report, who detailed the chaos and the communication breakdowns.

The lead counter sniper, identified by the Times as John Marciniak, conducted advance work for the event and also worked as part of the two-man counter-sniper team that ultimately shot and killed Crooks. He testified that he had been aware of a potentially serious security risk before Crooks fired shots. But he told the committee that he never considered sharing that information with the agents who were standing close to Trump.

“When we looked, just plain eyes, no optics or anything, you could see police running towards the building with their hands on their pistols,” Marciniak told the committee. “I think one actually had a pistol facing towards the ground, out of a holster. That’s a pretty big deal for us, so immediately we turned and faced our guns towards the threat area.”

Nonetheless, added Marciniak, the thought of notifying Trump’s shift agents so they could get him off the stage at that moment “did not cross my mind.”

As for the other top Secret Service leaders at the site, they did not even receive the information about a suspicious man — and that he had a range finder — until Crooks fired his shots, the report found.

One of those leaders, called the site counterpart, told the committee that she did not know what was going on. It quotes her as saying, “I can’t put out fires that I don’t know exist.”

Diffusing responsibility

The service’s decision-making, which involved compiling resource requests and relaying them to supervisors in Washington for approval and coordinating between Trump’s detail and the local field office, led to confusion. Even now, it remains uncertain who was assigned with setting the inner perimeter for event security — a crucial designation that determines the area of responsibility for the Secret Service as well as for local law enforcement.

During congressional interviews, the very agents who were collectively in charge of securing the event said the specific lines of responsibility were murky.

“Key USSS personnel responsible for planning, coordinating, communicating and securing the Butler, Pa. rally on July 13, declined to acknowledge individual areas of responsibility for planning or security as having contributed to the failure to prevent the shooting that day,” the report states.