The revelations add to a growing list of questions about the Secret Service’s plan to secure areas outside the perimeter and law enforcement’s failure to act quickly enough on multiple early warnings of suspicious activity. The Washington Post reported in a video analysis Monday that bystanders at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, alerted local police after seeing a man climb onto the roof of the building. A video posted to social media shows a man shouting, “Officer! Officer!” as others point toward the building. “He’s on the roof!” one woman says.
The Secret Service official’s account also underscores growing tensions between that agency and local authorities over who should be blamed for the shooter’s clear view of the scene. The Secret Service was responsible for the overall security plan, but the agency has said it relied on local law enforcement in areas outside the security perimeter. The AGR building was not within the perimeter, requiring members of the public to pass through a metal detector before being allowed inside.
The Secret Service official said the sniper team inside the building came from Beaver County, which borders Butler County, where Saturday’s rally took place. Local authorities said it was common for SWAT teams from nearby counties to supplement security at large events throughout western Pennsylvania.
The Beaver County District Attorney’s Office confirmed that a county SWAT team was present at the meeting on Saturday, but declined to provide additional information, citing ongoing investigations by state and federal authorities. In a written statement Tuesday, the county district attorney’s office said, “We are proud of the heroic actions of our officers.”
Richard Goldinger, the Butler County district attorney, said in an interview that his jurisdiction’s SWAT teams were all inside the secured perimeter. “The Secret Service was in charge, and so it was their responsibility to make sure the location and the surrounding area were secure,” he told The Post. “That’s common sense, I think. That’s their job.”
He added: “If they blame local law enforcement, then to me that is like shifting the blame to others when they have the blame on themselves.”
The Beaver Countian, a local news station, reported Monday that anti-sniper forces were inside the building, outside the security perimeter for the event. The station reported that a Beaver County police officer alerted a command center that he had seen a man with a rangefinder — a device that helps judge distances — before gunfire broke out.
The Secret Service counter-sniper who shot the gunman, 20-year-old Matthew Crooks, had him in his sights and was trying to determine whether he had a weapon and posed a threat, the official said. Secret Service radio traffic had indicated that local police had spotted or were trying to find a suspicious man near the building. The counter-sniper was a veteran marksman who is considered a legend in the Secret Service for his high ratings for accuracy at long ranges.
The counter-sniper who killed Crooks fired as soon as he saw Crooks raise a weapon, the official said. That counter-sniper killed Crooks in one shot, but seconds after he shot Trump, the official said.
The Secret Service’s advanced security plan to address one of the event’s biggest risks — someone shooting from high ground outside the rally perimeter — was to place two teams of Secret Service counter-snipers in front of the crowd, on the roofs of two barns behind Trump’s podium. The local counter-snipers stationed in the AGR building were to be “overcover,” watching the crowd from the rear and outside the perimeter.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said in a television interview that aired Tuesday morning that the reason the agency did not require a police officer to be on the roof of the AGR building was because of its slope. “That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point, and so there is a safety factor that would be taken into consideration, which is we wouldn’t want to put anybody on a sloped roof,” she said. “So, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from the inside.”
An analysis of footage of the incident by the Post found that the roofs of the sheds where the sniper teams were located were sloped steeper than the roof of the AGR building.
The risk of an open line of sight to a shooter is a security concern that the Secret Service has tried to address when planning presidential public appearances since John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a gunman in a Dallas high-rise building in 1963. Current and former Secret Service agents have expressed shock that a gunman was able to get so close to Trump in an incident that is being considered the most serious security lapse by the Secret Service since the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
The Post’s video analysis shows a police officer in a black uniform looking up at the top of the AGR building. The crooks began shooting two minutes and two seconds into the newly released video, which begins with a male voice saying people were pointing toward the roof. The shots began 86 seconds after the first audible attempts to alert police, according to the analysis, which synced several clips based on the sound of Trump’s voice over the public address system as he addressed supporters at a Butler County farm showground.
The Post reported Sunday that the Secret Service was relying on local police in Beaver and Butler counties to bolster its specialized tactical teams.
Evan Hill, Aron Shaffer, and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.