Posted on 07/14/2024 6:26:30 AM PDT by DoodleBob
How does a gunman, in plain view of some spectators, manage to open fire on a former president at a campaign rally protected by federal and local law enforcement?
That is the frightening and unanswered question facing the country — and security officials — after Donald Trump said he suffered a graze wound on his right ear while he was speaking in a field in Butler, Pennsylvania, and left the stage with a bloodied head.
Secret Service personnel shot and killed the gunman, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, immediately after he opened fire, the FBI said. A spectator was killed and two additional spectators were injured, but it was not immediately clear who shot them.
The assassination attempt, in which Crooks fired multiple shots at the stage from a roof outside the venue’s security perimeter, appeared to be the result of a grave lapse, perhaps the biggest since President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded outside a Washington hotel in 1981.
Security experts said it was difficult, and perhaps impossible, to eliminate every threat, particularly with long-range weapons and outdoor events.
But some said routine precautions should have prevented the shooter from getting onto the nearby roof.
>Steve Nottingham, a former SWAT commander in Long Beach, California, called Saturday’s shooting “a fundamental security failure.”
He has worked security details for visiting world leaders, including presidents, and now trains officers on how to respond to critical incidents. He pointed at likely breakdowns in the pre-event scouting and real-time monitoring of places a gunman could shoot from.
“They were behind the curve, because they should have had those places covered ahead of time,” Nottingham said.
Jim Cavanaugh, a retired special agent in charge with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who has been on Secret Service details, said he was surprised that the shooter was able to occupy an elevated position within rifle range of the rally site.
“Whenever I’ve been with them, every single high ground is taken by them or the local SWAT police,” Cavanaugh said. “There’s nobody allowed walking on rooftops. They command the high ground.”
He said a high-powered rifle like an AR-15 can hit targets 200 yards away. Trump was about 148 yards from the rooftop where the shooter was found dead, NBC News found, based on an analysis of Google Earth images.
Cavanaugh added: “Having been on Secret Service details, it’s amazing to me that somebody was on an elevated position that they didn’t know about.”
Pennsylvania State Police Lt. Col. George Bivens defended the Secret Service at a news conference after the shooting.
“It is incredibly difficult to have a venue open to the public and to secure that against any possible threat against a very determined attacker,” Bivens said. “That’s a huge lift.”
“The investigation will really give us an opportunity to take a look at where any failures occurred and what can be done better in the future,” he added.
The Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The FBI is leading the investigation, including its crisis response team members and evidence response technicians, it said in a statement Saturday evening.
Last month, as the presidential campaign heated up, the Secret Service said it was increasing the size of the detail assigned to Trump. The protection was bulked up “to ensure the highest level of security for not only the event sites but the travel in between events,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said at the time.
Perhaps the first sign that something was going wrong as Trump spoke Saturday came when spectators said they noticed a man with rifle bear-crawling on a nearby roof. One recalled trying to get the attention of law enforcement.
“The police are down there running around on the ground. We’re like, ‘Hey man, there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle,’” the witness told BBC News. “And the police were like, ‘Huh, what?’ Like they didn’t know what was going on. We’re like, ‘Right here on the roof. We can see him from right here. We see him. He’s crawling.’”
A couple of minutes later, the man opened fire, the witness said.
Kevin Rojek, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office, said at a news conference that law enforcement was not aware of the man’s presence on the rooftop until he started firing.
“It is surprising,” Rojek conceded when pressed by a reporter on the number of shots the gunman managed to fire.
He referred questions about advance security precautions to the Secret Service.
In the front row of the rally, attendees heard a series of pops and saw Secret Service agents jump on the stage. One, who identified herself as Erin, told NBC News that she saw blood on Trump’s ear. She did not fear for her own safety, she said. “We were only concerned about him,” she said, referring to Trump.
Trump said in a post on Truth Social a couple of hours later that a bullet “pierced the upper part of my right ear.”
“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” Trump wrote. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”
Former Secret Service agent Evy Poumpouras said it is impossible to eliminate every potential threat in a situation like Saturday’s.
Outdoor rallies pose enormous security challenges given the availability of high-powered weapons, Poumpouras said.
“Somebody can be out in the distance and really engage your target from a long range, and there are weapons out there that allow you to do this,” said Poumpouras, who protected multiple presidents, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, during her 12 years with the Secret Service.
“Let’s say you hunkered this whole area down. You’ve got the magnetometers; you’ve got the tactical element. Everything is locked and tight. How do you secure that outer perimeter? How far do you go? And can you cover everything? That’s a problem.”
She added: “Even if somebody is in an elevated position or not, how do you secure all of those elevated positions when you have weapons with the capabilities that are able to shoot long distances? This is what you are up against.”
Jillian Snider, a retired New York City police officer who was often detailed to political events, said it is routine for law enforcement to do a perimeter check extending a few hundred yards ahead of such an event.
“That doesn’t mean that someone can’t sneakily make their way to one of those positions afterward, especially if it was someone who had done some preplanning,” said Snider, an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “There are a lot of places in that area to hide, and you can’t monitor every possible position.”
“Someone who is that driven to do something like this will find a way to try and get the job done,” she added.
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Just to be clear, they were mediocre when they were hired - they didn't become mediocre while working there.
Here's a just a few of their more notable screwups.
November 2009: A Washington couple, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, crash Obama’s first state dinner. The Secret Service later acknowledges that officers never checked whether they were on the guest list.
November 2011: A man with a semiautomatic rifle parks in front of the White House and fires at the building, with Sasha Obama inside and Malia Obama on her way home. The Secret Service does not figure out that shots hit the building until contractors detect the bullets in the outside woodwork some time later.
April 2012: Eight Secret Service in Colombia lose their jobs after they took prostitutes from a strip club back to their hotel rooms. A Justice Department investigation finds that two Drug Enforcement Administration agents arranged one encounter between a prostitute and a Secret Service officer.
May 2013: A Secret Service supervisor leaves a bullet in a woman’s room at the Hay-Adams hotel, which overlooks the White House, and allegedly tries to force his way into the room to retrieve it.
December 2013: A man who stood close to President Barack Obama and other heads of state while providing sign language interpretation at Nelson Mandela’s memorial was a fake who was making up his own gestures, sign language experts say, raising questions about the security at the event.
March 2014: Three Secret Service agents responsible for protecting Obama in Amsterdam are placed on leave after a night of drinking, in violation of Secret Service rules. One of the agents passed out drunk in a hallway.
September 2014: A security contractor with a gun and an assault record got on an elevator with the president during a trip to Atlanta. The contractor used his cellphone to take video of Obama and did not stop when Secret Service agents told him to. The Secret Service only learned that the man has a gun after he was fired on the spot and turns it over.
September 2014: An man with a knife jumps the White House fence, dashes through the North Portico doors and makes it deep inside the building, into the East Room, before he is tackled, and only then by an off-duty Secret Service agent. A security alarm was disabled because staff nearby found it too noisy.
March 2015: Two senior agents hit a security barrier near the White House in a government vehicle. The men had been out drinking, celebrating the retirement of the agency's spokesman. When they reached the White House, their car barreled through temporary barriers blocking an active bomb investigation and they may have even driven over the suspicious package.
June 2015: A Secret Service officer in the Uniformed Division had his gun stolen from his personal car after parking it outside his girlfriend’s condo in Adams Morgan.
2022: Two men impersonated Federal agents while living in a penthouse apartment in Washington, D.C.'s Navy Yard paid for by DHS, and compromised U.S. Secret Service personnel involved in protective details. Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali had been offering free apartments and other gifts to U.S. Secret Service agents and officers. FBI agents also found a machine to create and program personal identification verification cards which can be used to access sensitive law enforcement computers. Taherzadeh and Ali had falsely claimed to work for the Department of Homeland Security on a special task force investigating gangs and violence connected to the Jan. 6 "insurrection" at the U.S. Capitol. They provided Secret Service officers and agents with rent-free apartments, including a penthouse worth over $40,000 a year, along with iPhones, surveillance systems, a drone, a television, a generator, a gun case and other policing tools. The investigation into these two only began when they were witnesses to an assault involving a letter carrier and Postal Inspection Agents interviewed them. The USPIS Inspector provided this information to the DHS Office of Inspector General, which then referred the information to the FBI for further investigation.
April 2023: An intruder entered the home of national security adviser Jake Sullivan undetected.
That means the shooter would have to have fired the second shot - if it was the second shot and there were 4 shots fired - in ~.217 seconds. That would be very fast trigger work with the recoil from an AR (Assumed - I don’t know details on the weapon).
I’ve expanded my theory to include possible crowd shouting but when you watch the vid you can see several people behind PDJT turn their heads towards the shooter’s direction. They heard something.
And if you add Divine Intervention into the equation then...🙂
Why was a obvious sniper postion, 150 years from one of the world top 10 high value targets, with ladder access left uncovered and unguarded?
At a bare minimum the Secret Service would have a uniform watching standing in front of it if this had been a Democrat speaker.
So all the postruing and blame shift is designed to ofuscate this point. Secret Service ownes the site. What every resources, state, local, federal they use does not matter. They are wholly responsible for security here.
In 2010, the enemedia and Demonicrats claimed that a map, release by Sarah Palin showing twenty Congressional districts with crosshairs on them because of the liberal votes by the respective incumbents, was responsible for initiating the attack on Gabby Giffords, leaving her severely injured from a head wound, and numerous other people dead or wounded.
In being consistent, the enemedia and Demonicrats should view Traitorjoe's "It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye" in the same light.
Right. I meant “have become” in the context of today’s government workers vs. the ones from several decades ago.
I was listening to the radio on my way to the hardware store and heard that Trump had done an interview with someone on Fox and said just before he was shot he turned to look at a screen that he was using as a visual aid. He was going to start talking about something involving statistics and had a graph to demonstrate what he was speaking about. Apparently he was a little ahead of where he would use that in the speech but wanted to look at it.
Thank God!!!
So it appears 20 year old moron bested the greatest security and protection force of the greatest nation on the planet.
I just saw a vid from close to the building the assassin was on. Updated “take”:
The closer sniper appears to raise his head to spot the shooter. (The chances of the shooter appearing over the ridgeline of the building already in the sniper’s ‘scope are nil.) Spotting the shooter the closer sniper adjusts and goes back to the ‘scope, but BOTH snipers flinch at the 1st 3 shots. The camera pans left so we don’t see the snipers return fire, but we hear other shots begin with a somewhat different sound and a faster rate.
In a different vid taken near the AG building one can hear the shooter’s 3 shots again, then 5 rapid, more powerful shots, a slight delay and a not-as-loud shot, another longer delay, and yet another not-as-loud shot.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/13/politics/video/shooting-video-gunman-trump-digvid
There is also this vid describing sniper target acquisition:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/politics/video/trump-shooting-security-failure-mills-ldn-digvid
It’s not “instant”.
So... I’m going to take back what I posted earlier — based on the video near the building, and especially the acoustics from that vid, I don’t think those 5 rapid shots came from the snipers near Trump, and those shots were not the shooter’s. I would guess a different “asset” nearer the building spotted the shooter popping up, got sights on him, and fired those 5 shots, taking the would be assassin down. The last two shots came from yet another LEO or SS (maybe the shooter twitched?)
In this scenario the snipers on the roof near Trump did not fire the grouping of 5 shots because the shooter had already been hit by the time they recovered and got dialed in / crosshairs on the target.
If more video / audio evidence comes in, the above is subject to revision!!!
Interesting, thank you.
So it appears 20 year old moron bested the greatest security and protection force of the greatest nation on the planet.
***********
Yeah exactly, how likely is that?
Lets don’t leave out the pathetic cop who climbed the ladder to the roof and when the shooter pointed his gun at him climbed back down. I mean you cannot make this chit up!
I’ll be listening to Dan Bongino’s Noon radio broadcast show on WMAL-FM via iHeart.
He’s a former Secret Service Agent and NYC cop and is going to be ALL OVER THIS...!
You’re right, of course...
Good info I did not hear.
Had family at the house this weekend and politics is verboten, so as soon as we knew PDJT was ok we turned it off.
I kept up via FR. Back when I was a newbee (or a lurker) I was on FR when Buckhead came on with the Bush Nat. Guard thingy. I was in awe of this site then. Still here, filtering through the posts...
Talk again soon Neverever!
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