Amid swirling questions about how the Secret Service allowed a gunman with an AR-style rifle to get close enough to shoot and injure former President Trump at a rally Saturday, some answers are starting to emerge.
The security gap appears to stem from how and what the agency communicated with local law enforcement before and during the event, and the apparent decision not to place security personnel on the building the gunman climbed up and shot from.
The gunman — Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa. — was killed by Secret Service agents, but not before he fired multiple shots toward the stage from a rooftop just outside the rally venue, about 152 yards from the GOP presidential nominee. The shooter grazed Trump’s ear with a bullet, killed one attendee and injured two others.
Members of the Secret Service’s countersniper team and counterassault team were at the rally and placed on rooftops immediately in the vicinity of the stage, but Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told ABC News that no agent had been placed on the building the shooter climbed because it had a “sloped roof.”
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point, and so there’s a safety factor that would be considered there, that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” she said in an interview aired Tuesday. “So, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from inside.”
That reasoning has gotten heavy blowback given that Secret Service snipers — a heavily armed counterassault team with the code name “Hawkeye” — were positioned on a roof that was also sloped. The team is responsible for taking out threats so agents on the ground can physically shield and remove the person they are protecting. Another Secret Service countersniper team, code name “Hercules,” was also at the rally to eliminate any long-range threats.
Local law enforcement agencies were tasked with securing areas around the venue that didn’t require attendees to go through magnetometers for screening, but officers told BeaverCountian.com a lack of manpower and “extremely poor planning” were to blame for endangering Trump.
While three snipers were stationed inside the building the shooter climbed, with an operations plan having them look out windows toward the Trump rally, no one was placed on the roof, local law enforcement officers said.
In her ABC interview, Cheatle confirmed “there was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.”
Part of the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service is the primary agency in charge of protecting current and former presidents, as well as presidential candidates and sometimes foreign dignitaries, a job that includes thousands of trips requiring event security.
That massive undertaking requires the agency to have assistance from local law enforcement, with the two teams typically working together on a rally for a major presidential candidate like Saturday’s.
Phil Andrew, a former FBI agent and head of the Pax Group security consulting firm, said protection at such events are made up of “three rings of security,” with the first being the Secret Service agents who can physically shield an individual, a second team working the perimeters of an event, and a third focused on the exterior areas.
While the first two rings are pretty much entirely Secret Service responsibility, local law enforcement can be used for the third, as it was with the building the shooter climbed.
“What seems to be the issue now is [whether] that part of the venue should never have been given to local law enforcement, or if it was ever reviewed as a vulnerability,” Andrew told The Hill. “And then if it was assigned to local law enforcement, how it was briefed, how it was understood to control it and maintain its security?”
In a Tuesday statement, the Secret Service said it was not putting any blame on local law enforcement.
“Our agency relies on the support of courageous police officers and local partners. We are deeply grateful for their unwavering commitment and bravery. Any suggestion otherwise is simply not true,” according to the statement posted to social media.
A lack of manpower also meant the local officers did not have spotters assigned to them, usually a standard operating procedure, according to BeaverCountian.com.
Once shots began to be fired, Secret Service members rushed the stage to shield Trump but were heard on the microphone asking each other, “What are we doing?!” and “Where are we going from here?”
The gap in coverage and confusion in the midst of the chaos has roiled many Trump supporters, some of whom allege gross incompetence at best and outright conspiracy at the worst.
Multiple investigations have since been opened into the incident, including by the Biden administration and several congressional committees.
Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, noted that “one of the most basic elements” for securing a site like the rally is to remove sight lines to the place where a protectee will be speaking.
The buildings just outside the perimeter of the rally, including the one the shooter climbed, should have been found to be within shooting range and had some law enforcement on top of them, or placed obstacles between them and Trump, McCabe told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“I think preliminarily, there are going to be a lot of questions about why those steps weren’t taken here,” McCabe said, adding that there are “many questions to be answered in light of what we now know.”
And several former top Secret Service agents told The Associated Press that the agency must find out how Crooks even gained access to the roof, suggesting there may have been a flaw in the event’s security plan.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), a former Navy SEAL, cautioned against jumping to assumptions.
“I’ve spoken with law enforcement, I’ve spoken with the Secret Service, [I’ve] gotten a better understanding of what actually happened,” he said in a video posted to social media. “Now, no excuses being made here, this is a security failure. Anytime a president gets shot, it is a security failure. But then we have to assess whose fault it was.”
Reports indicate Crooks was spotted observing the building by local law enforcement, who alerted others that he was walking toward the back of the building with a backpack. One officer was even reportedly hoisted up to the top of the building, but Crooks pointed his gun at them, and they dropped back down. State police also started rushing to the scene.
Crenshaw said their failure to actually confront the shooter was a problem, but it was important to keep in mind that the officers were not Secret Service agents or trained military specialists, and it was “likely the first time they’ve ever had to do security of this manner for such a large event.”
And Andrew said as Secret Service agents travel through the country and interact with any number of roughly 18,000 police departments, there can be differences in how individual departments respond to or understand what is communicated to them.
“There was a communication problem before, during and after, and there’s no question,” he said. “Whether Secret Service didn’t communicate that [local police] had responsibility, or did or asked somebody to, and they didn’t understand it and didn’t do it, there is some sort of pre-event communication issue.”
Many have also pointed to the fact that attendees in the crowd noticed the gunman on the roof nearly two minutes before the shots were fired, according to witness videos from the event.
Due to the time lapse, a popular conspiracy alleges the countersnipers purposefully didn’t take the shot when the shooter was spotted, but Crenshaw said agents are meant to exert control in an evolving situation where things aren’t clear.
“You’re a countersniper at a Trump rally, there’s people everywhere. It’s loud. Supporters are very excited. They will climb on top of whatever they can climb on top of to get to see Trump,” he said.
What’s more, if Secret Service agents believed the building had been secured by the local law enforcement team, they may have thought the shooter was a SWAT officer, “because those are the guys who were supposed to be at that building in the first place.”
“You don’t exactly know what you’re looking at, and the consequences of you making a mistake by shooting a civilian are enormous. They’re absolutely enormous,” he said. “Now, of course, the consequences of Trump getting shot are even more enormous. But you should at least have some context in your head before you start pointing fingers.”