assassination

Former President Obama says that the United States is at “an inflection point” following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and that President Donald Trump has further divided the country rather than work to bring people together.

“There are no ifs, ands or buts about it: The central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without resorting to violence,” Obama said Tuesday night during an event in Erie, Pennsylvania, hosted by the Jefferson Education Society, according to a transcript obtained by The Associated Press.

“And when it happens to some, but even if you think they’re, quote, unquote, on the other side of the argument, that’s a threat to all of us,” he said. “And we have to be clear and forthright in condemning them.”

Obama has kept somewhat of a low profile in his post-presidency. Responding to a moderator’s questions Tuesday, he addressed Trump’s rhetoric after Kirk’s assassination, as well as other administrative actions.

The Democrat spoke about his own leadership following the 2015 slaying of nine Black parishioners at a Charleston, South Carolina, church, as well as Republican then-President George W. Bush’s actions following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He said he sees the role of a president in a crisis “to constantly remind us of the ties that bind us together.”

The sentiment among Trump and his aides following Kirk’s killing of calling political opponents “vermin, enemies … speaks to a broader problem,” Obama said.

Kirk, a dominant figure in conservative politics, became a confidant of Trump after founding Arizona-based Turning Point USA, one of the nation’s largest political organizations. Trump has escalated threats to crack down on what he describes as the “radical left” following Kirk’s assassination, stirring fears his Republican administration is trying to harness outrage over the killing to suppress political opposition.

Trump’s White House on Wednesday responded to Obama’s remarks by blaming him for animosity in the country, calling him “the architect of modern political division in America.”

“Obama used every opportunity to sow division and pit Americans against each other, and following his presidency more Americans felt Obama divided the country than felt he united it,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

Obama on Tuesday also referenced Trump’s recent deployment of National Guard troops in Washington and ID checks by federal agents in Los Angeles. He urged citizens and elected officials to closely monitor the norm-busting decisions.

“What you’re seeing, I think, is the sense that through executive power, many of the guardrails and norms that I thought I had to abide by as president of the United States, that George Bush thought he had to abide by as president of the United States, that suddenly those no longer apply,” Obama said. “And that makes this a dangerous moment.”

Shortly after Kirk’s death, Obama wrote in a post on X that he and his wife, Michelle, were praying for Kirk’s family, adding: “This kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”

Obama said that he disagreed with many of Kirk’s stances, noting that his position “doesn’t negate the fact that what happened was a tragedy and that I mourn for him and his family.”

Calling political violence “anathema to what it means to be a democratic country,” Obama also mentioned the June shooting deaths of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home.

Obama also applauded Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s calls for civility in leading the public response to Kirk’s killing. Obama said that while he and the Republican governor “disagree on a whole bunch of stuff,” Cox’s messaging around how to respond to Kirk’s death shows “that it is possible for us to disagree while abiding by a basic code of how we should engage in public debate.”

Kinnard writes for the Associated Press.

Republicans and Democrats came together on the House floor on Wednesday to hold a moment of silence in honor of Charlie Kirk, just as news broke that the magnetic youth activist had been shot and killed.

The bipartisanship lasted about a minute.

The event quickly spiraled after a request to pray for Kirk from Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado led to objections from Democrats and a partisan shouting match.

Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a close friend of Kirk’s, told Democrats on the floor that they “caused this” — a comment she later said she stood by, arguing that “their hateful rhetoric” against Republicans contributed to Kirk’s killing.

Johnson banged on the gavel, demanding order as the commotion continued.

“The House will be in order!” he yelled to no avail.

The incident underscored the deep-seated partisan tensions on Capitol Hill as the assassination of Kirk revives the debate over gun violence and acts of political violence in a divided nation. As Congress reacted to the news, lawmakers of both parties publicly denounced the assassination of Kirk and called it an unacceptable act of violence.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he was “deeply disturbed about the threat of violence that has entered our political life.”

“I pray that we will remember that every person, no matter how vehement our disagreement with them, is a human being and a fellow American deserving of respect and protection,” Thune said.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), whose husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer three years ago, also denounced the fatal shooting.

“Political violence has absolutely no place in our nation,” she said in a post on X.

A few hours after the commotion on the House floor, the White House released a four-minute video of President Trump in which he said Kirk’s assassination marked a “dark moment for America.” He also blamed the violent act on the “radical left.”

“My administration will find each and every one of those that contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said as he grieved the loss of his close ally.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative millennial influencer who galvanized young Americans to support the GOP and was assassinated this week in Utah, was the most influential modern-day catalyst of shifting voting trends among fledgling voters, according to Republican and Democratic strategists.

Kirk founded the nonprofit Turning Point USA in 2012 at the age of 18, and it grew into a force that promoted conservative views on high school and college campuses across the nation.

“He found something among young people that none of us identified,” said Shawn Steel, a member of the Republican National Committee from Orange County who knew Kirk for nearly a decade and invited him to speak before the RNC’s conservative steering committee.

“He found an entire movement in America that conservatives were not even aware they could find. Not only that, he nurtured and created an entire new generation of conservative activists,” said Steel, the husband of former Rep. Michelle Steel. “His legacy will endure.”

The admiration for Kirk’s political organizing skills and mental acuity cut across political lines.

“Whether you agreed with him or not — and to be clear, I didn’t — he was one of the most brilliant political organizers of his generation, and probably generations before that,” said Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic strategist who served as an advisor to Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris. “He could be controversial, but he struck a nerve with people who were likely disengaged in politics prior to Turning Point and built a powerful movement.”

In addition to appealing to young voters about the economic headwinds they faced as they sought to climb the career ladder and tried to buy a house, Kirk also espoused sharply conservative views.

Beyond espousing traditional conservative views — being anti-abortion, pro-gun rights and dubious of climate change — Kirk was critical of gay and transgender rights, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying last year that if he saw a Black airplane pilot, he hoped he was qualified. He was accused of being an anti-Semite because of repeated comments about the power of Jewish donors in the United States, and of being Islamophobic because of comments such as describing “large dedicated Islamic areas” as “a threat to America.”

Kirk, 31 and a father of two, died Wednesday after being shot in the neck while speaking at Utah Valley University. Kirk’s assassination was the latest instance of political violence in an increasingly politically polarized country.

In June, Democratic Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, while state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife survived a shooting at their home, roughly five miles away, the same day. In 2022, a home invader bludgeoned the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). In 2017, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot during a practice session for an annual congressional baseball game. In 2011, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) barely survived an assassination attempt as she met with constituents in a Tucson strip mall.

President Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024 as he successfully sought reelection to the White House.

Kirk’s “mission was to bring young people into the political process, which he did better than anybody ever, to share his love of country and to spread the simple words of common sense on campuses nationwide,” Trump said Wednesday.

On Thursday, Trump told reporters on the White House’s South Lawn that Kirk was partly responsible for his victory in the 2024 presidential election and repeated that he would posthumously award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Turning Point USA, created a month before Kirk graduated from high school, became the new face of conservatism on college campuses and had chapters at more than 800 schools. Prominent conservatives heavily funded the group; in the fiscal year that ended in June of 2024, Turning Point reported $85 million in revenue.

Longtime GOP activist Jon Fleischman, the former executive director of the California Republican Party and the former chairman of the state’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1990s, said Kirk was pivotal to Trump’s election.

“Charlie Kirk was probably the single most prominent and successful youth organizer in the Trump movement,” Fleischman said, adding that Kirk superseded any other GOP organizer he knew at increasing conservative prospects among young voters.

“As somebody who cut their teeth as a youth organizer, I have nothing but awe for the level of sophistication he brought to that field of work,” he said.

Support for Trump among young voters exponentially increased in the 2024 presidential election, according to data compiled by Tufts University. While President Biden had a 25-point edge over Trump among voters ages 18 to 29 in the 2020 election, Harris had a four-point advantage among this cohort last year.

“This last election was the best performance Republicans have had with the youth vote, particularly male voters, in 20 years, maybe even going back to the ’80s,” said Steve Deace, a conservative radio host in Iowa who had known Kirk for a decade.

He gave credit for that success partly to work Kirk did on the ground at colleges across the country, notably being willing to amicably debate with people who disagreed with his beliefs.

“Charlie was basically a Renaissance man who was comfortable in a lot of settings. He wasn’t hoity-toity,” he said.

Deace and others added that this moment could be a turning point for the nation’s democracy and the split between the left and the right.

“We’re going to have a real conversation about whether we can share a country or not. The answer may be we can’t,” Deace said. “We have to decide if we are capable of the fundamental differences between us being adjudicated at the ballot box…. We have to decide if we can share a country. If we truly want to, we’ll figure it out. If we don’t, we won’t. That’s the conversation that needs to happen.”

Bombastic conservative commentator Roger Stone went further, arguing that modern-day Democrats are a greater threat to the nation than terrorists, drug cartels and foreign spies.

“The rot is too deep to reverse our course with mere rhetoric,” Stone wrote to supporters. “Sept. 10, 2025 was the day we crossed the Rubicon, lost our innocence and realized only one path remains to ensure humanity’s survival. The time for American renewal is at hand, and the tree of liberty shall germinate in warp speed with Charlie Kirk serving as the martyr of our glorious refounding.”

AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images

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The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has condemned Israel’s assassination of five Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza. Guterres is demanding an independent investigation into the killings, his spokesperson said on Monday.

UK and 13 allies have accused Iran of plotting killings and kidnappings on Western soil.

The United Kingdom and 13 allied nations have publicly accused Iran’s intelligence services of orchestrating a wave of assassination attempts, abductions and intimidation campaigns against individuals residing in Europe and North America.

In a joint statement issued on Thursday, governments including the United States, France, Germany and Canada denounced Tehran’s alleged extraterritorial operations as a flagrant breach of national sovereignty.

“We are united in our opposition to the attempts of Iranian intelligence services to kill, kidnap, and harass people in Europe and North America in clear violation of our sovereignty,” the group said.

The signatories – which also included Albania, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK – urged Iranian authorities to halt these activities, which they claimed were increasingly carried out in partnership with international criminal groups.

A UK parliamentary committee recently attributed at least 15 plots targeting individuals in the UK since 2022 to Iranian intelligence operatives.

British officials have responded with tighter measures. In March, the UK government said Iran would be required to register any political influence activity inside the country, citing “escalating aggression” from its intelligence services.

In May, UK police arrested seven Iranians over alleged threats to national security, which Iran’s  Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced as “suspicious and unwarranted”.

Similar concerns have emerged elsewhere in Europe. Dutch security services said Tehran was behind a foiled 2024 attempt to assassinate an Iranian dissident in the Netherlands – charges Iran denied.

Authorities arrested two suspects, one of whom is also linked to the shooting of Spanish politician Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a vocal supporter of the Iranian opposition.

Across the Atlantic, the US Department of Justice charged three European-based gang members and later a senior Iranian official with plotting to kill an Iranian-American journalist. Two were convicted earlier this year, while the third pleaded guilty. Prosecutors claimed the men acted at the behest of the Iranian state. Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called such statements “baseless”.

The allegations come at a time of renewed tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme. Talks between Iran and Western powers remain frozen. Last week, Iranian officials held “frank” discussions in Istanbul with diplomats from the UK, Germany and France.

The meeting marked the first engagement since Israel’s mid-June air strikes on Iran, which triggered a 12-day flare-up involving US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

While Israel insists Iran is covertly pursuing nuclear weapons, a claim it has not substantiated, Tehran maintains its nuclear activities are for civilian use only.

US intelligence agencies, meanwhile, assessed in March that Iran was not actively developing a bomb, contradicting former President Donald Trump’s claim that it was “close” to doing so

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Monday released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.

The digital document dump includes more than 240,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

In a lengthy statement released Monday, King’s two living children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, said their father’s killing has been a “captivating public curiosity for decades.” But the pair emphasized the personal nature of the matter and urged that the files “be viewed within their full historical context.”

The Kings got advance access to the records and had their own teams reviewing them. Those efforts continued even as the government granted public access. Among the documents are leads the FBI received after King’s assassination and details of the CIA’s fixation on King’s pivot to international anti-war and anti-poverty movements in the years before he was killed. It was not immediately clear whether the documents shed new light on King’s life, the civil rights movement or his murder.

“As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief — a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met — an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,” they wrote. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”

They also repeated the family’s long-held contention that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating King, was not solely responsible, if at all.

Bernice King was 5 years old when her father was killed at the age of 39. Martin III was 10.

A statement from the office of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called the disclosure “unprecedented” and said many of the records had been digitized for the first time. She praised President Trump for pushing the issue.

Release is ‘transparency’ to some, a ‘distraction’ for others

Trump promised as a candidate to release files related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. When Trump took office in January, he signed an executive order to declassify the JFK records, along with those associated with Robert F. Kennedy’s and MLK’s 1968 assassinations.

The government unsealed the JFK records in March and disclosed some RFK files in April.

The announcement from Gabbard’s office included a statement from Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, who is an outspoken conservative and has broken from King’s children on various topics — including the FBI files. Alveda King said she was “grateful to President Trump” for his “transparency.”

Separately, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s social media account featured a picture of the attorney general with Alveda King.

Besides fulfilling Trump’s order, the latest release means another alternative headline for the president as he tries to mollify supporters angry over his administration’s handling of records concerning the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself behind bars while awaiting trial in 2019, during Trump’s first presidency. Trump on Friday ordered the Justice Department to release grand jury testimony but stopped short of unsealing the entire case file.

Bernice King and Martin Luther King III did not mention Trump in their statement Monday. But Bernice King later posted on her personal Instagram account a black-and-white photo of her father, looking annoyed, with the caption “Now, do the Epstein files.”

And some civil rights activists did not spare the president.

“Trump releasing the MLK assassination files is not about transparency or justice,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton. “It’s a desperate attempt to distract people from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility among the MAGA base.”

The King Center, founded by King’s widow and now led by Bernice King, reacted separately from what Bernice said jointly with her brother. The King Center statement framed the release as a distraction — but from more than short-term political controversy.

“It is unfortunate and ill-timed, given the myriad of pressing issues and injustices affecting the United States and the global society,” the King Center, linking those challenges to MLK’s efforts. “This righteous work should be our collective response to renewed attention on the assassination of a great purveyor of true peace.”

Records mean a new trove of research material

The King records were initially intended to be sealed until 2027, until Justice Department attorneys asked a federal judge to lift the sealing order early. Scholars, history buffs and journalists have been preparing to study the documents for new information about his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King co-founded in 1957 as the civil rights movement blossomed, opposed the release. The group, along with King’s family, argued that the FBI illegally surveilled King and other civil rights figures, hoping to discredit them and their movement.

It has long been established that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was intensely interested if not obsessed with King and others he considered radicals. FBI records released previously show how Hoover’s bureau wiretapped King’s telephone lines, bugged his hotel rooms and used informants to gather information, including evidence of King’s extramarital affairs.

“He was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the King children said in their statement.

“The intent … was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” they continued. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth — undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.”

The Kings said they “support transparency and historical accountability” but “object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods.”

Opposition to King intensified even after the Civil Rights Movement compelled Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After those victories, King turned his attention to economic justice and international peace. He criticized rapacious capitalism and the Vietnam War. King asserted that political rights alone were not enough to ensure a just society. Many establishment figures like Hoover viewed King as a communist threat.

King’s children still don’t accept the original explanation of assassination

King was assassinated as he was aiding striking sanitation workers in Memphis, part of his explicit turn toward economic justice.

Ray pleaded guilty to King’s murder. Ray later renounced that plea and maintained his innocence until his death in 1998.

King family members and others have long questioned whether Ray acted alone or if he was even involved. Coretta Scott King asked for the probe to be reopened, and in 1998, then-Atty. Gen. Janet Reno ordered a new look. Reno’s Justice Department said it “found nothing to disturb the 1969 judicial determination that James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King.”

In their latest statement, Bernice King and Martin Luther King III repeated their assertions that Ray was set up. They pointed to a 1999 civil case, brought by the King family, in which a Memphis jury concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. had been the target of a conspiracy.

“As we review these newly released files,” the Kings said, “we will assess whether they offer additional insights beyond the findings our family has already accepted.”

Barrow writes for the Associated Press. AP journalist Safiyah Riddle contributed to this report from Montgomery, Ala.

The release of hundreds of thousands of pages related to civil rights leader comes despite his family’s opposition.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has released more than 230,000 pages of files relating to the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

In a statement issued on Monday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called the release “unprecedented” and cited the president’s commitment to “complete transparency”.

Trump signed an executive order after taking office, declassifying documents relating to the assassinations of King, former President John F Kennedy and former Senator Robert F Kennedy.

King’s records had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered them and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

The National Archives released records from John F Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination in March and files related to the June 1968 murder of Robert F Kennedy in April.

King was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder and died in prison in 1998, but King’s children have expressed doubts that he was the assassin.

His family, including his two living children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, were given advance notice of the release and had their own teams reviewing the records ahead of the public disclosure. Those efforts continued even as the government unveiled the digital trove.

In a lengthy statement released on Monday, the King children called their father’s assassination a “captivating public curiosity for decades”. But the pair emphasised the personal nature of the matter and urged that “these files must be viewed within their full historical context”.

During his lifetime, the civil rights leader had been the target of an “invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign” orchestrated by then-FBI director J Edgar Hoover, they said in a joint statement.

The FBI campaign was intended to “discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” they said. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth.”

It was not immediately clear on Monday whether the release would shed any new light on King’s life, the civil rights movement or his murder.

Timing of release raises eyebrows

Besides fulfilling the intent of his January executive order, the latest release serves as another alternative headline for Trump as he tries to mollify supporters angry over his administration’s handling of records concerning the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself behind bars while awaiting trial in 2019, during Trump’s first presidency. Trump last Friday ordered the Department of Justice to release the grand jury testimony but stopped short of unsealing the entire case file.

On social media, users accused the administration of releasing King’s files as an attempt to distract from criticisms over its handling of the Epstein files.

This is shameful.

Instead of honoring the Trump administration’s promise to release the Epstein files, DNI Tulsi Gabbard is trying to distract the public by dredging up discredited FBI smears against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., against his family’s wishes.

Weaponizing…

— Evaristus Odinikaeze (@odinikaeze) July 21, 2025

Bernice King and Martin Luther King III did not mention Trump in their statement on Monday. As of late Monday afternoon, the administration had not commented on the release.

The King records were initially intended to be sealed until 2027, until Justice Department lawyers in June asked a federal judge to lift the sealing order ahead of its expiration date.

U.S. Secret Service Acting Director Ronald L. Rowe Jr. responds to questions from Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) during a Full Task Force hearing on the Secret Service’s security failures regarding the assassination attempts on President-elect Donald J. Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024. The Government Accountability Office issued a report that said the Secret Service had information on the shooting prior to the incident but failed to relay it. File photo by Jemal Countess/UPI | License Photo

July 13 (UPI) — Federal security officials received key information about an assassination attempt on President Donald Trump when a gunman’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear at a rural Pennsylvania campaign rally last summer, a Government Accountability Office report shows.

The report, commissioned by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Secret Service received tips on the attempted assassination at least 10 days prior to the incident in Butler County, Penn., “but failed to relay the information to federal and local law enforcement personnel responsible for securing and staffing the event,” a report released by the Senate Judiciary Committee said.

The report said the Secret Service had no process in place to share the information.

“As an important step, I allocated $1.17 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill to provide the Secret Service with additional funding,” Grassley said in a release regarding the report. “I’m hopeful this significant injection of resources will go a long way in bringing the agency up to speed.”

Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheadle had said there was no information made available leading up to the attack one year ago, but Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said that was not true.

“She did not tell the truth,” Paul said during an appearance on the CBS News program Face the Nation. “She said there were no assets that were requested in advance. We found at least four occasions, actually, maybe five occasions, where requests were made. The primary request that was made by both Trump’s Secret Service detail, as well as his campaign was for counter-snipers.”

Paul contended that there was “plenty of time to take him off the stage” based on the information that was available. He said a report of a suspicious person with a range-finder equipped weapon turned out to be the shooter who made the attempt on Trump’s life.

The GAO report said the site agent responsible for identifying vulnerabilities was new to her job and that the Butler County rally was the first time she had planned and secured a large, outdoor event.

The agency said the six unnamed individuals face punishments ranging from ’10- to 42-day suspensions without pay’.

Six Secret Service agents on duty during last year’s failed assassination attempt against United States President Donald Trump have faced disciplinary action, including suspensions ranging from 10 to 42 days, the agency has said.

The US Secret Service said it was prohibited from releasing the names of those facing disciplinary action in a Thursday statement marking the one-year anniversary of the shooting at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, 2024.

It said the six individuals face punishments ranging from “10- to 42-day suspensions without pay”, while all will also be “placed on restricted duty or into non-operational positions”.

The statement did not specify the grounds for their suspensions, but said the incident – in which a lone gunman opened fire at a rally in the town of Butler – represents an “operational failure”.

The attacker accessed a nearby rooftop with a direct line of sight to the former president as he spoke on stage. A bystander was killed, while Trump’s ear was reportedly wounded in the attack. Agents shot and killed the gunman at the scene.

In an interview with Fox News set to air on Saturday, Trump said the Secret Service should have stationed an agent on the rooftop. “There were mistakes made. And that shouldn’t have happened,” he said.

The agency said it will carry the event as a “reminder of the critical importance of its zero-fail mission and the need for continuous improvement”.

“Breakdowns in communication, technological issues, and human failure, among other contributing factors, led to the events of July 13,” it said.

The Secret Service said it has implemented 21 of 46 recommendations made by congressional oversight bodies in the wake of the assassination attempt.

Secret Service Director Sean Curran, who was in charge of Trump’s security detail at the rally, said the agency “has taken many steps to ensure such an event can never be repeated in the future”.

Detailed in the Secret Service statement were new protective measures for golf courses.

Soon after the Butler assassination attempt, a man with a gun hid near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course in Florida with the intent to kill the then-Republican presidential candidate.

Prosecutors said Ryan Routh methodically plotted to kill Trump for weeks before aiming a rifle through the shrubbery as he played golf on September 15, 2024. A Secret Service agent spotted Routh before he was able to open fire on Trump.

On Thursday, Routh told Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida he wants to get rid of his court-appointed federal public defenders and represent himself at trial. Routh did not state his reasons for doing so.

Cannon did not immediately rule on Routh’s request and said she will issue a written order with her decision. Routh’s trial is scheduled to begin on September 9.