About 20 to 25 minutes before Thomas Matthew Crooks shot the former president, local police officers noticed he was acting strangely and sent his photo to a command center staffed by state troopers and Secret Service agents, the head of the Pennsylvania State Police told a congressional committee Tuesday.
Secret Service personnel who protect Trump and accompanied him backstage complained to confidants and others within the agency that they were never briefed on the warning, said three people who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations about that day. They also said they were unaware that local snipers eventually lost track of Crooks, or that another local officer — hoisted onto the roof of a building just outside the rally site’s security perimeter — had seen Crooks perched there with a gun.
The Trump team’s first warning of trouble came when gunshots began to ring out at 6:11 p.m., eight hours. Minutes after Trump took the stage, the three people said. The assassination attempt wounded Trump, killed one rallygoer and seriously injured two others.
Some of Trump’s top advisers, gathered in a large white tent behind the stage where the president was speaking, believed the shots were fireworks, two of the people said, and did not immediately dive to the ground. According to the two people, Trump’s advisers said they were informed of the problem as soon as the shots were fired and were confused why the suspicious-person alert was not relayed to them so they could consider delaying Trump’s speech — a sentiment Trump echoed in a televised interview.
“Nobody talked about it. Nobody said there was a problem,” the former president said in an interview broadcast Monday. on Fox News. “They could have said, ‘Let’s wait 15 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes, something. Nobody said — I think that was a mistake.'”
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Saturday that the agency declined to comment on questions from The Washington Post about radio communications received by Trump’s security personnel at the Butler rally. He reiterated that the agency is examining all elements of the incident, including whether there was a breakdown in communications between its personnel or other law enforcement, to determine precisely what happened.
“With respect to communications at the rally, the Secret Service is committed to better understanding what happened before, during, and after the attempted assassination of former President Trump to ensure it does not happen again,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “This includes full cooperation with Congress, the FBI, and other relevant investigations.”
A Trump spokeswoman declined to comment.
The concerns from Trump’s security detail and advisers come after a period in which tensions between the former president’s inner circle and top intelligence officials simmered for months — and boiled over after the July 13 assassination attempt.
Trump’s team has clashed with Secret Service headquarters over various requests that the agency has refused, including adding more magnetometers at events, more snipers at some events and other specialized teams at others, the Post reported. The Secret Service and Trump’s team also clashed repeatedly over security and logistics at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.
The Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting is also emblematic of what some Secret Service critics say are chronic communications problems that have plagued the agency and contributed to serious security failures.
Members of Congress have repeatedly questioned the role that poor communication played in allowing Crooks, 20, to shoot Trump, an episode widely considered the worst security failure by the Secret Service since President Reagan was shot in 1981. Communication breakdowns — due to the different radio frequencies that Secret Service teams use to work together and technical failures in communications systems — have been at the root of other major security failures at the agency. When a shooter began shooting at the White House one night in November 2011, for example, President Obama’s daughter, Sasha, was home with her grandmother. But an agent protecting Sasha Obama was unaware of the shooter for several minutes because the agent was using a different radio frequency than the officers and agents stationed at the White House. And no one had alerted him to the threat outside.
At Trump’s rally this month, the fact that law enforcement was searching for a suspicious person just outside the security perimeter may have influenced the security decisions made by Trump’s team, although it’s unclear whether it would have prompted them to prevent him from taking the stage.
Sometimes suspicious people or activities are reported at Trump rallies, and it turns out that there is nothing suspicious, said one of the people interviewed by The Washington Post, who is close to Trump and familiar with the operations at his rallies. Typically, when suspicious people are reported, they are inside the reinforced Secret Service perimeter of the rally, meaning they have been screened by magnetometers designed to prevent people from entering with weapons. That would not have been reassuring to Crooks, given that he was just outside the secure area.
A Secret Service official told the Post that investigators were still working to determine whether anyone passed on information about the suspect to Trump’s security detail or other Secret Service operations teams.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said reports of suspicious people are common enough at some public events and sometimes are not enough to change plans or alert the senior official’s security detail, a team of about five to 10 officers who serve as the person’s innermost circle of security.
At a House Oversight Committee hearing Monday, then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was asked why the Secret Service didn’t immediately delay Trump’s speech or respond more aggressively when local police reported a suspicious person. She told lawmakers that such reports were commonplace.
“In a number of our protected sites, suspicious individuals are identified on an ongoing basis,” she said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they pose a threat.”
Cheatle told lawmakers that the Secret Service was notified of a suspicious person at the Pennsylvania rally “between two and five times” and that she did not know when countersnipers or “shift” (another term for Trump’s security detail) were notified of those warnings. The agency was investigating whether there was a communications breakdown that prevented an effective response, she said.
Cheatle resigned last week under intense pressure from Republican and Democratic lawmakers outraged by the security failures.
Pennsylvania State Police Col. Christopher L. Paris told the House Homeland Security Committee Tuesday that local police officers considered Crooks suspicious because he was walking just outside the rally site and not entering it. Their suspicions grew when they saw him with a golf rangefinder, Paris said. At that point, they sent a photo of Crooks to a Pennsylvania state trooper who was stationed in a command center with Secret Service agents.
That officer relayed the message verbally to the Secret Service command center. The Secret Service requested that the warning be forwarded to another phone number, which State Police said belonged to a Secret Service “tactical agent,” Paris testified.
Several committee members asked Paris whether law enforcement agencies were able to communicate effectively on the day of the Butler rally. Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas) asked if there was a common radio channel on which law enforcement could sound the alarm if there was a threat. “If not, how many people have to go through to get to the right actor to say, ‘Stop!’?”
“I don’t know,” Paris replied.
Paris said that on the day of the Butler rally, there were three separate radio systems for local, state and federal law enforcement. The state police had sought to integrate the Secret Service’s communications by sitting together in a single command post, he said.
He added that there were disadvantages to sharing a single communication channel between multiple law enforcement officers.
On the day of the rally, more than 100 people needed medical attention due to the heat, and officers received reports of a missing 6-year-old and three other suspicious people in addition to Crooks, he said. “In theory, the more people you have on the same channel, the more people you have logging in at the same time in a medical emergency or a missing 6-year-old, and the more people you have logging in at the same time, the more communication you have.”
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