Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks first came to the attention of local law enforcement as he tried to pass through the metal detectors roughly three hours before firing shots at former President Donald Trump. Officials noticed he was carrying a rangefinder and immediately alerted the Secret Service.
Fox News reported he was next seen an hour before the shooting occurred. A local sniper team and multiple rally attendees spotted Crooks scoping out the area around the building from where he would soon fire at Trump. According to Fox, Crooks looked “so suspicious” that the sniper team took a photograph of him.
Crooks left the area, but later returned carrying a large backpack. He was observed climbing up to the roof by rally attendees who reported this information to local officials who reportedly relayed it to the Secret Service. About ten minutes before Trump took the stage, the Secret Service designated Crooks as a “threat.” And eight minutes into Trump’s remarks, the shooting began.
Why did the Secret Service allow Trump to take the stage? Why didn’t agents neutralize the threat before putting Trump in harm’s way?
Although many security failures have come to light in the days since the assassination attempt on Trump, these are the questions that loom the largest and have people demanding an explanation. And so far, the agency has provided no good answers.
When Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was asked why she had not posted snipers on a roof that offered a direct shot at the stage, she said it would have been dangerous because of the building’s sloped roof.
Given the lack of an adequate response from Biden administration officials and the public’s growing mistrust of the Biden FBI and Department of Homeland Security, people are looking at the timeline of the assassination attempt and drawing their own conclusions.
In a Tuesday op-ed, the Federalist’s Sean Davis said out loud what some of us are likely thinking. At least I am.
To be clear, Davis does not claim that Secret Service officials were conspiring with the would-be assassin to kill Trump. Rather, he made the case that top security brass “deliberately and with malice aforethought created the conditions that led to” the shooting. Specifically, he noted that “[t]hey deliberately starved Trump’s security team of the resources it needed. And they did it repeatedly, over many weeks and months.”
Davis wrote that Trump’s security detail was “understaffed, under-resourced, and stretched to its limits.” Following the assassination attempt, sources within the Secret Service community told RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree that “resources were diverted to Jill Biden’s event and away from Trump’s because they followed agency protocol applying to Trump as a former president.”
In a Thursday letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) inquired about two briefings held on July 8 (in which the FBI had participated) relating to security for events that would take place on July 13 in Pennsylvania. First Lady Jill Biden was scheduled to speak at a dinner for the Italian Sons and Daughters of America and Trump would be holding a rally. Whistleblowers told Jordan that a Secret Service special agent had informed both groups that the agency “had limited resources that week” because they were also covering the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Summit in Washington, D.C.
Jordan included a list of detailed questions he said Wray should be “fully prepared” to answer when he testifies before the committee on July 24. In particular, Jordan wants to know if the “security posture” at Trump’s rally was “limited” because of the first lady’s event and the NATO summit.
Regarding the alarming security failures that occurred at the Trump rally, Davis finds it “increasingly difficult to believe this was just a series of independent mistakes. In contrast, when you look at the entire picture, what you see better resembles a deliberate plan to make Trump vulnerable but to appear at first glance to be just a couple of innocent mistakes.”
Given that the Democrats’ determination to destroy Trump has become their raison d’être, I have to agree. We have watched them abuse their power too many times to take them at their word.
So, no, the idea that Democrats might dial back security at his events to leave him vulnerable to the whims of a deranged citizen who believes their spin that Trump is Hitler is not crazy. Frankly, now that Democrats have exhausted every other possibility, and Trump is still standing, what alternative do they have?
A harsh assessment? Yes. Unreasonable after the Biden administration’s Soviet-style persecution of Trump? Not even a little.
[Update: July 19 – 7:55 a.m.]
A Friday morning report from Fox News may explain Jordan’s impatience. A lawmaker (who spoke on the condition of anonymity) who attended Wednesday’s FBI briefing on the shooting told Fox that “Congress was denied access to the Integral Ops Report that details the protection plan for former President Trump’s rally.”
Fox News contributor Paul Mauro, an attorney and retired NYPD inspector, noted that “the Ops Report should detail who was supposed to cover the area of the roof that Crooks fired from. If there was no Ops Plan done, or if it didn’t cover that rooftop, whoever signed off on it failed badly.”
“Now that lawmakers are being blocked from seeing the report, and the Secret Service was quick to point the finger at the local police, it screams they’re in cover your a** mode,” Mauro said.
He added, “There’s a lot of culpability, and this idea that, oh, the locals blew it, that idea is already starting to fall apart.”
A previous version of this article appeared in the Washington Examiner.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA
Fox News reports a whistleblower claiming other than the SAIC it wasn’t even USSS AT this Sewage Circus, it was Homeland Security Investigations – a group that specializes in interrogation, intimidation and Inquisition, nothing even REMOTELY like protection.
If true it would explain a great deal about this dumpsterfire.
It gets worse by the day, doesn’t it?
Betsy, speaking as a former protective professional myself… men of the field have taken their own lives in disgrace for failures that were downright TRIVIAL next to this.