Recently released texts between Beaver County emergency services reveal that local police were short-staffed on the day of the protest due to a lack of personnel.
According to an anonymous team leader, he had only a few people available because “everyone was either working, on vacation, or injured.”
An anonymous team leader wrote in a text chat that they had been “asked by Butler to help out” and that they needed six people to support the 12-hour shift. Two offered to do it all the time, and another two offered to split the Saturday shift.
The new messages, bodycam footage and police debriefing were obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
At 4:26 p.m., more than 90 minutes before Trump took the stage, a Beaver County sniper finished his shift and left the AGR building. As he did so, he sent a text message about a suspicious person he had spotted, Thomas Matthew Crooks. The officer noted that he was sitting at a picnic table “approximately 50 yards from the exit.”
Later at 5:38 p.m., officers exchanged photos of Crooks, who was then listed as a “suspicious person,” more than 30 minutes before Trump was shot.
‘Child learning (sic) around the building we are in. I saw him looking at the stage with a rangefinder. FYI. If you want to warn SS snipers, they have to watch out.
Another officer asked in which direction Crooks was headed, to which an unnamed officer replied, “If I had to guess, back. Away from the event.”
This comes after a whistleblower revealed last week that the Secret Service obstructed the use of drone technology to map the site of the Butler rally where an assassin attempted to shoot former President Donald Trump.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) revealed that a whistleblower told his office the night before the meeting that the Secret Service “repeatedly rejected offers from a local law enforcement partner to use drone technology to secure the meeting.”
The whistleblower alleged that after the shooting, the Secret Service “changed course and asked the local partner to deploy drone technology to monitor the location thereafter.”
According to Hawley, the drones offered were “capable of not only identifying active shooters, but also taking them out.”
Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas Hawley was asked to produce all documentation and communications related to the drone offer.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump is led off the stage during a rally on July 13, 2024
Snippers stand on a roof at the campaign rally of Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump is spied on by US Secret Service agents at a campaign rally
The new allegation marks a new step in the investigation into the Secret Service’s biggest security failure since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.
After six hours of damning testimony on Monday, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday.
She had spent most of the day dodging questions and giving contradictory answers, such as why the roof where gunman Thomas Crooks carried out his attack was not within the security perimeter, even though it was within gun range of the stage. And why Trump was allowed on stage when Crooks had been identified as a suspect an hour before he fired his shots.
When asked why there was no officer on the roof, the director explained that it was because the agency generally “prefers sterile roofs.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers on Wednesday that the 20-year-old gunman flew a drone 200 yards from the stage and had three explosives in his car just two hours before opening fire in Butler, Pennsylvania.
On July 13, thugs shot Trump in the ear just 400 feet from the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, from the roof of a nearby building, just outside the event’s security perimeter.
Wray said Crooks and his family owned a combined 14 guns and that Crooks had visited a shooting range the day before the rally. Crooks used an AR-style weapon that was legally purchased by his father and sold to him in October 2023.
According to Wray, eight rounds of ammunition were found on the roof where Crooks shot the former president.
After six hours of damning testimony on Monday, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday
He also would not rule out that Crooks had no accomplices in the crime, saying the case was still being investigated by police.
When confronted with questions about why the president was allowed on stage when the “threat” had been identified 20 minutes before the shots were fired, Wray said, “We don’t know the answer to that.”
He said no one at the police station saw Crooks in a shooting position with a gun in his hand until “moments before” he fired, but that they did see him on the roof “minutes before that.”
The FBI and Secret Service revealed to lawmakers last week that they had identified Crooks as a suspect 62 minutes before he fired a shot.
He was seen carrying a rangefinder, which Cheatle said was “not a prohibited item” at Trump rallies, but that wasn’t enough to identify him as a threat.
Twenty minutes before Crooks fired a shot, he was spotted on the roof.
A bullet grazed Trump’s ear. An audience member, Corey Comperatore, 50, was killed and two others — David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 57 — were seriously injured but are in stable condition.