On the astonishing security failures attending the attempted assassination of Donald Trump

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump represents one of the most astounding security failures in recent memory. If standards at the Butler rally represent how Trump has been protected until now, it’s amazing he wasn’t killed long ago. Thomas Matthew Crooks was by all accounts an unsophisticated would-be assassin, who raised the suspicion of law enforcement long before he opened fire, who took up his firing position in full view of many spectators who tried repeatedly to warn police, and who was even spotted by counter-sniper personnel whose entire mission was to prevent people like him from doing what he did.

Unfortunately, reporting on these security lapses has been fragmented, with key information buried in local media reporting. Here I’ll try to compile all the most important revelations in one place, both to reveal the full scope of the failure and to assist you in developing your own theories about what happened here.

First is the video evidence.

@MilkBarTV on Twitter has done the Lord’s work by editing together much of the disparate footage of the Trump assassination attempt into one continuous clip.

It’s only four-and-a-half minutes long, and I recommend you watch it at least once all the way through, as it is clarifying on many points. Here are the highlights:

• At around 0:35, we have the first recorded spectator attempts to alert police about the would-be assassin on the roof of the AGR International building.

• It is then an agonising 86 seconds until Crooks opens fire at 2:01, and he continues shooting until about 2:07, in two bursts – first three shots, one of which strikes Trump; and then a quicker burst of five shots.

• It’s hard to hear, but I think the clicking sound at 2:17 is the counter-sniper fire that kills Crooks.

• Trump stands up at 3:06, and thereafter agents jostle his microphone, causing a sound that the journalist mistakes for further gunfire.

We have since learned what prompted Crooks to start shooting when he did:

Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe confirmed to KDKA-TV that an armed municipal officer with Butler Township encountered shooter Thomas Crooks before he fired shots from a rooftop building outside the perimeter of former President Trump’s rally.

The sheriff said he was not made aware of any potential threats, but confirmed an officer encountered the shooter on the roof, and didn’t fire his weapon.

“All I know is the officer had both hands on the roof to get up on the roof, never made it because the shooter had turned towards the officer, and rightfully and smartly, the officer let go,” Sheriff Slupe said.

Sheriff Slupe says before the shooting, the officer and others were previously alerted to a suspicious person and began searching for him right away.

Sheriff Slupe said this officer was hoisted by another officer to the roof of a building where the shooter had taken a position.

The shooter, Crooks, focused his rifle on the officer who let go and fell off the roof. Then, the 20-year-old began firing into the crowd.

In subsequent interviews, Slupe has reiterated his defence of the officer, going so far as to call internet critics “assholes” and suggesting that he saved Trump’s life because “ten seconds before that … the president was looking straight ahead” and the “bullet could have potentially landed” much more directly. I can’t agree with this. Crooks started shooting when he realised security forces were closing in on his position; whether that was better or worse for Trump is very hard to say.

What is clear, however, is that secret service and police do not have a mere 86-second delay to account for. Officials became aware of Crooks a full half hour before he opened fire:

According to multiple law enforcement sources, Thomas Crooks was spotted by law enforcement on a roof nearly 30 minutes before shots were fired that injured Trump, killed a former fire chief and injured two others in the crowd.

Channel 11’s Nicole Ford confirmed that Beaver County’s ESU team had eight members at the rally, including snipers and spotters. According to Ford’s sources, one of them noticed a suspicious man on a roof near the rally at 5:45 p.m., called it in and took a picture of the person. We have learned from our sources the person in that picture is Thomas Crooks. We’re told it’s not clear if Crooks had a gun with him at that point.

According to multiple sources, a law enforcement officer had also previously seen Crooks on the ground and called him in as a suspicious person with a picture prior to 5:45 p.m. Our sources tell us an officer checked the grounds for Crooks at that point, but did not see him where the first picture was taken.

26 minutes after the second picture of Crooks was taken by law enforcement and the information called in, shots were fired from the roof of the American Glass Research building. Seconds later, a Secret Service sniper returned fire and killed Crooks.

Even more egregious is the fact that there was a counter-sniper team in the AGR International factory building – not on the roof, where they would’ve been most useful, but on the inside, where they had set up a “‘watch post’ … to scan for threats”:

A local police counter-sniper team was stationed inside the building where attempted assassin Thomas Crooks climbed on the roof and fired on Donald Trump, law enforcement sources told The Post.

The building — the AGR International Inc. factory in Butler, Pennsylvania — was being used by local police as a “watch post” for snipers to scan for threats as the former president spoke onstage only 130 yards away, according to sources.

Cops were inside, but not on the roof during the shooting, sources said …

Law enforcement sources said the building was swept by cops before the event and that the local sniper team used the large manufacturing site as a staging and lookout post — but did not climb on the roof for the event — possibly over concerns that it would interfere with the Secret Service snipers.

And scan for threats they did. It was a member of this counter-sniper team who took early notice of Crooks’s extremely suspicious behaviour:

A Beaver County police officer warned a command center of seeing a man with a rangefinder before former president Donald Trump was shot on Saturday. The officer had also warned the man was scoping out the roof of the building he was stationed in as a counter-sniper, and that the man returned with a backpack before ultimately scaling the building …

BeaverCountian.com spoke with multiple law enforcement sources about security provided by agencies from Beaver, Butler and Washington counties during Saturday’s rally. They claim a lack of manpower and “extremely poor planning” put the former president’s life in grave danger.

Because not a day can go by without more embarrassing revelations about the catastrophic security failures, U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle gave an interview yesterday, in which she offered perhaps the most bizarre and laughable explanation possible for the absence of a counter-sniper team on that crucial roof:

Embattled Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle says she has no plans to resign, even after the stunning revelation that the agency decided not to guard the roof from which Thomas Crooks opened fire on former President Donald Trump because it was too slanted.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” she told ABC News in a startling admission.

“And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside,” she told the outlet.

Here is the gravely dangerous “sloped roof”:

Anybody who is not a sphere would have no difficulty standing there, and in case you think I am playing games with angles, here is another, more direct view:

Consider, for comparison, the far more steeply sloped roof of the building behind the podium, where counter-snipers staged throughout Trump’s short speech all without falling off:

Cheatle’s obfuscation is so ill-considered that it demands explanation. If there were a good rationale for keeping law enforcement off the roof of that building – worries about interference with or cross-fire from the other counter-sniper team behind Trump, as some have suggested – the Secret Service director surely would’ve said as much. That she didn’t and reached instead for this weak tea, must mean that the true reason is a deeply embarrassing one – something on the order of this rumour, highlighted by friend-of-the-blog El Gato Malo:

The New York Post reports that Jill Biden was behind Cheatle’s appointment as Secret Service director. Cheatle had served on Biden’s “second lady detail” and her “senior aides” wanted her to have the job:

Four sources close to President Biden’s family, including people who interacted with Cheatle during the Obama-Biden administration, said she was well liked by the future first lady and her most senior aides, including top adviser Anthony Bernal.

“Cheatle served on Dr. Biden’s second lady detail and Anthony pushed for her,” a Democratic insider told The Post. “Anthony has no national security or law enforcement experience. He should have no influence over the selection of the USSS director.”

“I heard at the time she was being considered for director that Anthony had pushed her forward as an option,” another well-placed source told The Post.

Bernal, 51, is widely regarded as rivaling even White House chief of staff Jeff Zients in terms of influence over administration decisions …

“Anthony is obsessed with being DEI-compliant,” a third source told The Post, using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion — the human resources practice of attempting to ensure diversity in the workforce.

Real Clear Politics, meanwhile, provides interesting information on the “inflexible protocols” of the Secret Service and their severe staffing problems. Their sources complain of mismanagement and the lack of local resources caused by parallel events held by Jill Biden and Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on the same day as Trump’s rally. To that comes the fact that Trump’s personal Secret Service detail is relatively small and calibrated to the typical demands of a lower-profile former president. They have made up the shortfall, in part, by leaning more heavily on local law enforcement. This would explain why the Secret Service provided only two counter-sniper officers to the rally, otherwise relying on state and local police to secure the crucial AGR International building.

All of this seems like a massive cock-up to me – one that may well have been driven by a malicious indifference towards Trump’s security, but also one that is in the end a massive embarrassment for the Secret Service. If there were any kind of conspiracy in play, the least we’d expect is for those involved to have arranged better excuses for their failures.