Donald Trump was mere inches from being shot dead Saturday in what’s been widely characterized as the Secret Service’s biggest failure in decades.
The near-murder of Trump was immediately damning for the Secret Service–whose entire purpose is to protect prospective, current, and past presidents (and their families)–but the blunder has become even more mind-boggling as more details have surfaced.
That included the Secret Service conceding Tuesday that local cops were inside the very building where Thomas Crooks, 20, perched himself on a rooftop—less than 150 yards from Trump, a distance most proficient shooters consider an almost certain kill zone. Yet, those agents were unable to stop Cooks from climbing onto the roof, pulling out a rifle, and rattling off multiple shots toward the former president—one going through his ear, and another fatally striking a former fire chief who was attending the rally with his wife and daughter.
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Below, The Daily Beast has broken down the most egregious of the Secret Service’s failures known to date at Saturday’s rally in Pennsylvania.
Pre-rally prep
Thomas Crooks was less than 150 yards from Donald Trump, with a clear line of sight, when he opened fire.
The Daily Beast/Google EarthThings were bad from the jump for those tasked with protecting the former president. His rally was just outside Butler, a town of 13,000, and was in a mostly-open field with only a handful of buildings inside and outside the event’s official perimeter.
Among those was the Agr International building, where Crooks infamously laid flat and opened fire at Trump. Despite advance teams arriving at the rally site as early as July 10 to prepare, the Agr building was designated to local law enforcement instead of the Secret Service—supposedly because it fell outside the event’s official perimeter and which was a usual practice, according to Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
That decision baffled security and military experts. The retired sniper Dallas Alexander, whose Canadian Special Operations team is responsible for the furthest confirmed kill in history, said in a video statement Sunday that Crooks was in the “most fucking obvious” place for a gunman, adding that even a “seventh-grader” would’ve known to have the rooftop on lockdown.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who’s been ordered to appear before Congress next week to attest for the security disaster, claimed Tuesday morning that the Secret Service didn’t have their own snipers on the building’s roof because it was “sloped,” which made it a safety issue. That excuse doesn’t add up, however, since Secret Service snipers were photographed on an equally sloped—if not more sloped—roof at the rally, behind Trump’s stage.
Slipped through the cracks
There were few elevated places for a shooter to go outside Donald Trump’s rally.
Reuters/Brendan McDermidDonald Trump’s rally was slated to begin at 6 p.m. local time Saturday, and the former president officially started his speech about five minutes late.
Crooks had his first encounter with security at 3 p.m. Saturday during a security screening, CNN revealed. A rangefinder Crooks was carrying alerted personnel, who, according to CNN, kept an eye on him until he left the area.
Crooks’ next moves are uncertain, but it is believed he returned to his car to grab his rifle. He apparently used the building’s air conditioning system to climb on top of the building, a senior federal law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told CNN.
Local law enforcement had their first encounter with Crooks 20 minutes before Trump’s speech and deemed he was suspicious, Beaver County Emergency Services revealed Tuesday. How, then, did Cooks continue to walk just outside the rally’s perimeter unchecked? That question remains unanswered, despite local officials admitting that officers at the scene deemed Crooks appeared so “suspicious,” that a local cop had taken a photo of him more than 15 minutes prior to the rally’s scheduled start.
Failure to respond
Secret Service snipers killed Thomas Crooks within seconds of him opening fire.
ReutersChilling videos from the rally showed that some attendees spotted Crooks crawling onto the roof well before he was in a position to open fire, calling into question authorities’ response time to literal screams that there was a gunman on the roof.
In one clip, obtained by The Washington Post, a man can be heard screaming “Officer! Officer!” as others point toward the Agr building and Crooks, a full 86 seconds before he fired his first shot. Others appeared to note that Crooks was on the roof more than two minutes before he opened fire at 6:11 p.m.—approximately six minutes into Trump’s rally spiel.
“Look, they’re all pointing,” someone could be heard saying in a separate clip, as at least one police officer walked around the side of the building. “Someone’s on top of the roof.”
“There he is, right there,” said another. “Right there, see him? He’s laying down!”
Those clips have been backed up by multiple witnesses, who claimed they desperately tried to get police to stop Crooks to no avail. That included Greg Smith, who told BBC News he and others tried to alert police for “two or three minutes” that an armed man had reached the roof.
The officers in the clip appeared to match the uniforms of the Butler Township Police Department, who was working in coordination with the Secret Service.
Michael Slupe, the Butler County Sheriff, told local news outlets that moments before Crooks opened fire, one of his deputies reached the ledge of the Agr building’s roof and spotted Crooks, but had to let go of the ledge and retreat when the 20-year-old pointed his rifle at him.
Just 12 seconds before the first shot was fired, an officer can be seen walking around the building Crooks was atop of. In other videos from those pivotal final seconds, people screamed that a man on the roof had a gun.
MilkBarTV compiled some of these cellphone videos and stitched together a timed montage—a chilling four-and-a-half minute clip that shows the chaotic moments before a former U.S. president was nearly gunned down. The clip showed that seemingly everyone outside the rally’s perimeter knew a shooter was about to open fire. Yet, the scores of snipers and Secret Service agents inside the perimeter did nothing to stop him.
“They were looking at him while he was looking at them,” one senior law enforcement official told CNN, describing how Crooks met eyes through the rangefinder with one of the four counter-sniper teams.
While Crooks wasn’t stopped before pulling the trigger, the Secret Service said he was killed by a sniper—who fired a single shot—within seconds after opening fire.
The aftermath
Harsh criticisms of the Secret Service and its director, Kimberly Cheatle, arrived within hours.
Joe Biden called for an independent investigation into what went wrong, which was echoed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas who called the incident a security “failure.”
Security experts and lawmakers from both parties have agreed with Mayorkas’ assessment, saying they’re perplexed at how Crooks, a relative nobody, was able to come within an inch from murdering a former U.S. president.
Cheatle has been ordered to testify in front of Congress on Monday to answer about her agency’s failings. As of Tuesday evening, the Secret Service is yet to concede outright that it was its own failures that led to Saturday’s disaster. Instead, the agency has insinuated the fault lies with local police who failed to secure the outside perimeter.
Regardless of who’s to blame, the attack exposed long-standing issues within the Secret Service. Jason Chaffetz, who was chair of the House Oversight Committee in 2015 when it penned an investigative report on Secret Service security failures, has long called for the Secret Service to hire more agents. On Sunday, he called the Trump rally a “catastrophic failure.”
“We did all these investigations and did an extensive report so this would never happen again,” he told the Post. “It’s as if they paid no attention to the bipartisan recommendations.”
