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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Yeah, I knew it wouldn’t take them long to try to turn this into a gun-control issue instead of an assassination attempt.
I'm just going to come out and say that they DID know about it. We're maybe even complicit. I will believe this unless proof is presented otherwise.
I don’t believe this was accidental. It’s to obvious for anyone with experience with high security event planning training.
Yes you are correct. It is all a cluster F...
“It would be VERY NICE if the media would start pointing out at least some of the calls for VIOLENCE against Trump and other Republicans”
*************
The media doesn’t want to talk about this because they too share responsibility for instigating this kind of tragic event with their vicious and relentless attacks against Trump.
DELIBERATE SETUP
I agree- one thing intentional about this was the assassin getting about five rounds off before the "Jack Ruby" SS sniper took out the patsy antifa shooter.
It was Saturday so the business was likely closed and nobody around.
Good point- there is no way this side of hell that he should have been able to so casually and carelessly get that close with a rifle. And also, he was able to get off shots AFTER people were reporting g that he was on the roof. The cops shou.d have immediately informed ss of the man and his location, and ss should have immediately surrounded Trump onstage BEFORE the shots were fired, while ss figured out what was going on.
At the very least, the absolute least, so eone should have yelled to President Trump, or spoke into an earpiece he was no doubt wearing, that there was a possible shooter on a roof, and to take precautions immediately while they figured out if it was true or not.
This was a colossal failure- the only question remaining g is “was it an intentional failure”?
This was not a security failure. A layman on the street would know to put a Secret Service asset on that roof. This was clearly a Deep State assassination attempt.
Especially since there were so few roofs in the immediate area- the fai,ure to do so is inexcusable
“Security experts said it was difficult, and perhaps impossible, to eliminate every threat, particularly with long-range weapons and outdoor events.”
That’s true, but to NOT have men stationed on every roof within 200 yards of where the president will be speaking is gross and utterly ridiculous negligence. Every rooftop should have been secured, locked down, and guarded for the two days in advance of the president’s arrival up to his departure.
Doesn't pass the smell test. I'm not a security professional and even *I* know you don't leave a roof available to a shooter when the distance to the target is approximately 150 yards.
There is one other way. That being that the SS have gone down the same rabbit hole of fecklessness that much of the rest of the government has.
That said, it seems very odd to me that a 20 year old with no military experience scouted this out himself and knew just where he'd be able to climb onto a rooftop while having cover between two buildings, and that this would give him a clean line of sight at President Trump.
I would argue by fractions of an inch. This is America after all.
“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.”
The counter-sniper had the perp in his sights when the shooting started. According to the video, the counter-sniper flinched for a second and then returned fire without sighting in on the perp. They knew he was there.
I think most Americans would be shocked at how mediocre the people in these government agencies have become.
He didn’t miss. Trump turned his head at the exact right time. God is watching over him I’d say.
So a would be assassin wanders around with a rifle looking for an unsecured vantage point and manages to find the most obvious point totally unsecured climbs up on it in plain sight and gets a number of shots off.
I agree. Watching the video of the SS, why did they have the target already acquired and they were ready to shoot, but paused. They KNEW the guy was there and had acquired the target.
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