When former President Donald Trump ascended the stage at last weekend’s Pennsylvania rally to thunderous cheers, the campaign staffers present expected to hear a typical stump speech.
What they didn’t know: Law enforcement had spotted a suspicious person at the rally nearly an hour earlier and had been trying to find him.
Just minutes after Trump started speaking, that same suspicious person – 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks – opened fire at the former president, coming inches away from assassinating him.
Members of Trump’s team weren’t told that law enforcement was trying to locate Crooks in the minutes before he took the stage, and there was no conversation over whether Trump should have delayed his entrance, sources who were at the rally with the former president told CNN.
That’s despite the fact that local police had spotted Crooks multiple times with a rangefinder, a hunting device similar to a pair of binoculars that calculates distance, and had circulated a photo of him they had taken.
“We would have never let him go out there if we thought there was a threat to him,” one source present with Trump told CNN.
Beyond the looming question of why Crooks tried to kill Trump, the Secret Service is facing growing scrutiny over its security preparations and response at the rally – including why Trump was allowed to go onstage in the first place, and whether it was communicated to agents around him that people in the crowd had spotted the gunman on a nearby roof at least two minutes before the shooting.
Secret Service and FBI briefers told members of Congress on Wednesday that law enforcement was trying to locate Crooks for at least 19 minutes before he fired but did not find him again until he was seen climbing on the roof outside the security perimeter, according to members who were in the briefing.
Trump, who was running roughly an hour behind schedule when he arrived at the rally, went through his normal routine of taking photos backstage and mingling with a VIP crowd before walking through the tented command center that led to the stage, a second source present with Trump said. They added there was no delay between “the photo clicks,” as the campaign calls it, to him walking to the podium at 6:02 p.m.
A Secret Service source familiar with the incident told CNN that Crooks had been “deemed a suspicious person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there was any indication that he was an immediate threat” or had a weapon until just before the shooting.
Suspicious people aren’t uncommon at events like Trump rallies – even on Saturday, “a guy tried to come in with a goat” and a woman showed up “riding a horse with a giant Trump flag,” and both were also deemed suspicious, the Secret Service source said.
Four former Secret Service agents who spoke to CNN said that a report of a suspicious person by itself wouldn’t necessarily have prompted a call to stop Trump from getting onstage. But they said communication failures between the various law enforcement agencies present at the rally likely contributed to the security breakdown that resulted in Trump’s near-assassination.
Joe Funk, a former Secret Service agent who served for more than 20 years, said that suspicious people showing up at presidential events is a “very common occurrence,” and “we really hardly ever held the president back.”
But he questioned why the roof that Crooks ascended was not secured before the rally, and why reports that he was there did not lead to more immediate action to protect Trump. Videos show that spectators noticed Crooks on the roof and tried to point him out to police at least two minutes before he fired, but law enforcement did not respond in time.
Tom Knights, the manager of the local Butler Township, said in a statement Wednesday that an officer had hoisted himself to the roof and saw Crooks, but dropped to the ground after the gunman aimed at him. The township police “immediately communicated the individual’s location and that he was in possession of a weapon,” Knights said, but Crooks started firing “moments” later.
“If you see a guy with a gun, somebody has to get word to the Secret Service and the Secret Service has to react immediately,” Funk said. If a report had been radioed out that police were investigating a report of a man with a gun, “that might have given that Secret Service detail a couple seconds, 10, 15, 20 seconds, to remove the president. It’s happened before.”
Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and CNN law enforcement analyst, agreed that the security of the rally was marked by “multiple points of failure” in communications and coordination.
When Crooks initially approached a security checkpoint with a rangefinder – which law enforcement sources have told CNN happened about an hour before the shooting – it should have been “a big, big red flag,” Wackrow said. “The Secret Service should have engaged with the suspect right then and there with one of their protective intelligence teams to conduct a field interview.”
Later, Wackrow said, there should have been more security at the building who could have spotted Crooks as he ascended the nearby building and perched on the roof.
“Why didn’t that message get back to the Secret Service or additional resources to basically flood the field?” Wackrow asked. “All it would take is for one person to have distracted that shooter to potentially prevent this attack from happening.”
Trump’s advisers and family have praised his personal Secret Service detail, some of whom have been with the former president since he was in the White House, while still criticizing the agency and its response.
At an event hosted by CNN and Politico at the GOP convention in Milwaukee on Thursday, top Trump adviser Chris LaCivita accused Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle of dodging lawmakers’ questions. Asked if she should resign, he said, “yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.”
Eric Trump, the former president’s son, told CNN on Tuesday that the Secret Service agents “on that stage love him. They would take a bullet for him and they demonstrated that.”
But more broadly, he said, the Secret Service “let somebody with a gun within 130 yards of the former president of the United States and very likely the future president of the United States, and there’s got to be accountability for that.”
That’s an assessment that multiple former personnel for the agency agree with.
Former Secret Service agent Robert McDonald, who questioned how law enforcement surveillance could have “allowed him to now get on top of that roof,” said that the incident could lead to changes in the agency’s operating procedures.
“The Secret Service needs to have looked inside itself to develop the answers to the questions of what happened here, why it happened, how it happened, and, more importantly, how we prevent this from happening again,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has opened an investigation into the shooting, and Secret Service leadership are expected to testify before Congress next week.
CNN’s Zachary Cohen, Allison Gordon, Holmes Lybrand and Sean Lyngaas contributed reporting.
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