Shortly after the attempted assassination of former President Trump last month, local police in Pennsylvania complained that they had warned the Secret Service days earlier that the warehouse where the gunman opened fire needed to be guarded, new video shows.
The video, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, offers further insight into who was responsible for the flawed security that allowed suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks to fire at least eight shots at President Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.
“I told them f***ing we gotta put them over here. … I told them f***ing on Tuesday,” the Butler Township officer said in an audio recording from his body camera. “I talked to the Secret Service guys. They were like, ‘Yeah, no problem. We’re gonna put them over here.'”
The attack left one rally participant dead, two seriously injured and the president with a hearing injury, and lawmakers have called for accountability and launched multiple investigations into who was responsible for the security failures.
In one video, a local police officer radios in to say that Crooks, a suspicious person authorities were missing at the time, is “a gentleman with a flat face that we were looking for before. He was scaring people.”
“He was watching people in the woods near the water tower. We don’t know if it was the man who fell,” the officer said in audio recorded by his body camera.
The video also shows confusion on the ground regarding the shooter, with one officer telling another, about 10 minutes into the attack, “I thought you guys were on the roof. I thought it was you guys. I thought it was you guys.”
The second officer explained that no one was on the roof.
“What the hell,” the policeman replied, “Why wasn’t he on the roof? Why wasn’t he there?”
The incident has drawn much criticism, with the Secret Service reportedly believing that snipers from the Butler County Emergency Services Unit were meant to secure the roof of a building just outside the rally’s security perimeter.
But local authorities have strongly opposed the move, claiming they told Secret Service agents before the event that they could not fully secure the building.
Instead, local snipers were positioned inside the building on the second floor.
The intense scrutiny of the Secret Service led directly to the resignation of Director Kimberly Cheatle last month.
At a congressional hearing shortly after her resignation, Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Lowe also revealed communications gaps between Secret Service agents and local police, including the fact that they did not use the same radio frequencies — gaps that prevented officers from hearing warnings that the shooter was armed until it was too late.
At the same hearing, Rowe accepted responsibility for this egregious safety failure.
