Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks first came to the attention of local law enforcement as he tried to pass through the metal detectors roughly three hours before firing shots at former President Donald Trump last Saturday. Officials noticed he was carrying a rangefinder and alerted the Secret Service.
Approximately an hour before the assassination attempt, a local sniper team and multiple rally attendees spotted Crooks scoping out the area around the building from where he would soon fire at Trump. According to Fox News, Crooks looked “so suspicious” that the sniper team took a photograph of him.
Crooks left the area but later returned carrying a large backpack. He was observed climbing up to the roof by rally attendees who reported this information to local officials, who reportedly relayed it to the Secret Service. About 10 minutes before Trump took the stage, the Secret Service designated Crooks as a “threat.” And eight minutes into Trump’s remarks, the shooting began.
Why did the Secret Service allow Trump to take the stage? Why didn’t agents neutralize or at least verify the threat allowing Trump’s rally to continue?
Although many security failures have come to light in the days since the assassination attempt on Trump, these are the questions that loom the largest and have people demanding an explanation. And so far, the agency has provided no good answers.
When Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was asked why she had not posted snipers on a roof that offered a direct shot at the stage, she said it would have been dangerous because of the building’s sloped roof.
Given the lack of an adequate response from Biden administration officials and the public’s growing mistrust of the Biden FBI and Department of Homeland Security, people are looking at the timeline of the assassination attempt and drawing their own conclusions.
In a Tuesday op-ed , the Federalist’s Sean Davis said out loud what some of us are likely thinking. To be clear, Davis does not claim that Secret Service officials were conspiring with the would-be assassin to kill Trump. Rather, he made the case that top security brass “deliberately and with malice aforethought created the conditions that led to” the shooting. Specifically, he noted that “[t]hey deliberately starved Trump’s security team of the resources it needed. And they did it repeatedly, over many weeks and months.”
Davis wrote that Trump’s security detail was “understaffed, under-resourced, and stretched to its limits.”
Following the assassination attempt, sources within the Secret Service community told RealClearPolitics’s Susan Crabtree that “resources were diverted to Jill Biden's event and away from Trump's because they followed agency protocol applying to Trump as a former president.”
In a Thursday letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) inquired about two briefings held on July 8 (in which the FBI had participated) relating to security for events that would take place on July 13 in Pennsylvania. First Lady Jill Biden was scheduled to speak at a dinner for the Italian Sons and Daughters of America and Trump would be holding a rally. Whistleblowers told Jordan that a Secret Service special agent had informed both groups that the agency “had limited resources that week” because they were also covering the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Summit in Washington, D.C.
Jordan included a list of detailed questions he said Wray should be “fully prepared” to answer when he testifies before the committee on July 24. In particular, Jordan wants to know if the “security posture” at Trump’s rally was “limited” because of the first lady’s event and the NATO summit.
A Friday morning report from Fox News may explain Jordan’s impatience. A lawmaker (who spoke on condition of anonymity) told Fox after attending Wednesday’s FBI briefing on the shooting that “Congress was denied access to the Integral Ops Report that details the protection plan for former President Trump's rally.”
Fox News contributor Paul Mauro, an attorney and retired New York City Police Department inspector, noted that “the Ops Report should detail who was supposed to cover the area of the roof that Crooks fired from. If there was no Ops Plan done, or if it didn't cover that rooftop, whoever signed off on it failed badly."
“Now that lawmakers are being blocked from seeing the report, and the Secret Service was quick to point the finger at the local police, it screams they're in cover-your-ass mode,” Mauro said.
He added, "There's a lot of culpability, and this idea that, oh, the locals blew it, that idea is already starting to fall apart."
Regarding the alarming security failures that occurred at the Trump rally, Davis finds it “increasingly difficult to believe this was just a series of independent mistakes. In contrast, when you look at the entire picture, what you see better resembles a deliberate plan to make Trump vulnerable but to appear at first glance to be just a couple of innocent mistakes.”
Given that the Democrats’ determination to destroy Trump has become their raison d'être, I have to agree. We have watched them abuse their power too many times to take them at their word.
So, no, the idea that the Biden administration might neglect security at his events and leave him vulnerable to the whims of a deranged citizen is not crazy. Frankly, now that Democrats have exhausted every other possibility and Trump is still standing, what alternative do they have?
A harsh assessment? Yes. Unreasonable after the Biden administration’s Soviet-style persecution of Trump? Not even a little bit.
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Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal . Follow her on X or LinkedIn .
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