Pennsylvania Secret Service Chief Timothy Burke is one of five agents assigned to “administrative duties” as part of the investigation into the failures that allowed 20-year-old Thomas Crooks to shoot Donald Trump last month.
Burke is the Special Agent in Charge (SAIC) of the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh field office and has held that position since at least 2016.
When reached by phone, Burke, 48, told DailyMail.com he could not comment on the case.
MSNBC reported Friday morning that SAIC and four others had been placed on leave, but did not name Burke.
According to NBC News, four Pittsburgh field officials, including the department’s head, and a Trump agent were placed on leave.
The massive security failure that led to the horrific shooting triggered investigations by numerous government agencies that are still ongoing.
A source familiar with the events of the July 13 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, told DailyMail.com that Burke was not on site that day, but his job included approving the security plan for Trump’s campaign rally.
Timothy Burke, head of the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh field office
Several secret service agents have been placed on leave pending the investigation into the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, reports suggest.
Burke was named by his SAIC title in an April Secret Service press release about a crackdown on cybercrime, as well as in a 2016 press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania about the extradition of a Cuban hacker.
Pittsburgh’s Secret Service chief also participated in a video conference on cybersecurity in 2021.
Burke knew before the campaign rally that Secret Service resources were limited, according to a letter that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray on July 18.
Jordan said whistleblowers told him that USSS Special Agent in Charge Tim Burke “advised law enforcement partners that the USSS had limited resources that week as the agency was covering the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Washington, DC” at a Secret Service briefing on July 8, five days before the Trump rally.
Federal officials have turned to Congress to expose the alleged ongoing debacle within the Secret Service that led to the horrific security failures in July and other problems.
Tristan Leavitt, chairman of the watchdog group Empower Oversight, which represents some of those whistleblowers, railed against the Secret Service’s lackluster response to the shooting in a public statement, saying Burke and the four other USSS officers should have been placed on leave immediately rather than being assigned desk work for the duration of the investigation.
Thomas Matthew Crooks at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13 before opening fire on the crowd and the former president
“Administrative leave is a paid status in which you are not allowed to come to work – days ‘on the bricks’ or ‘at the beach,’ as federal agents often call it,” Leavitt wrote on Twitter. “That is not the case here.”
“Here, the USSS has merely assigned these employees administrative tasks, which it should have done at least on July 13.”
“You should be taken out of the office and sent on investigative leave.”
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi declined to comment on reports that the agents were placed on leave because it was a “personnel matter.”
However, he told DailyMail.com that they are still “investigating the processes, procedures and factors that led to this outage.”
“The U.S. Secret Service expects its personnel to maintain the highest professional standards, and any identified and proven violations of policy will be investigated by the Office of Professional Responsibility and may result in disciplinary action.”
The suspended agents are expected to continue working for the Secret Service and will be paid. They have most likely been reassigned to an administrative role while the investigation continues.
Crooks’ plot led to the resignation of CIA Director Kimberly Cheatle and raised a number of questions, including how he managed to get onto a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump’s speech there was clearly visible.
The potential assassin was spotted by witnesses before the shooting and the secret service and police were warned of his presence.
Nevertheless, he was able to open fire at least eight times with the AR rifle he had received from his father.
Republican Rep. Mike Waltz told DailyMail.com earlier this week he was not convinced the crooks acted alone.
He said the shooter’s motive was still unknown and he feared a foreign entity or other third party may have been involved in the attack.
Waltz asked how the feds could say with certainty that Crooks was a loner when they couldn’t answer other questions, such as why he had multiple encrypted messaging accounts abroad.
His comments came after it was revealed that Iran was also planning an attempt on the former president’s life around the same time Crooks was carrying out his plan.
“The deeper we dig into this, the more questions I have,” Waltz said. “What’s really disturbing is what’s coming to light.”
“What I find most disturbing is that there are ongoing plots from Iran to kill a former president and leading candidate and that a Pakistani citizen was just arrested after paying a down payment for assassins, and this is barely reported in the news.”
Crooks, 20, managed to create several explosive devices using remote detonators, which also made Waltz suspicious and asked him if he had any help.
While the FBI, Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security conduct their investigations into the massive security failure, Waltz and twelve other members of a House task force are also investigating the attempted murder.
“I don’t understand, and I don’t yet have answers that help me understand how the (intelligence) service and DHS came out so quickly and said – and I think the FBI did too, but I have to check – that he was operating alone,” Waltz told DailyMail.com on Wednesday at Trump Tower in Chicago.
“How do you know this after only a few days of your investigation?”
The Florida congressman added: “You can’t tell us his motive, but you could tell us he acted alone? You can’t access these encrypted overseas accounts, but you can tell us he acted alone? So I don’t believe that yet.”
In Arizona, a man was arrested after threatening to kill Trump at a rally in Cochise County near the southern border with Mexico. Ronald Syvrud, 66, was arrested shortly before Trump’s speech.
In the July 13 shooting, a bullet from Crooks’ AR-style weapon, which his father had legally purchased, grazed the former president’s right ear.
Crooks killed one rally participant and seriously injured two others before he was incapacitated.
The FBI also found explosives in Crooks’ car, which was parked near the rally site. And when they searched his parents’ house, where he lived, they found more bombs.
“I don’t know many 19-year-olds who could build multiple remote-controlled explosive devices,” Waltz told DailyMail.com. “Why wasn’t this picked up when he looked it up online or bought literature about it?”
