Local law-enforcement officers spotted the gunman who attempted to kill former president Donald Trump earlier than previously believed, according to newly released text messages that offer fresh details into the security failures at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
The messages show that a local sniper with Beaver County, Pa., law enforcement saw shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, at 4:26 p.m. eastern time on July 13, the day of the Trump shooting, near the building that Crooks would use to carry out the attack over 90 minutes later.
“Someone followed our lead and snuck in and parked by our cars just so you know,” a Beaver County sniper texted after leaving the AGR International industrial building, notifying Beaver County and Butler County snipers inside the AGR building. Crooks would later fire eight shots into the crowd from the building’s rooftop, wounding Trump and two others and killing former fire chief Corey Comperatore.
“I’m just letting you know because you see me go out with my rifle and put it in my car so he knows you guys are up there he’s sitting to the direct right on a picnic table about 50 yards from the exit,” the sniper added.
Before Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) released the texts and additional documents on Monday, Crooks was thought to have been spotted 45 minutes or so later and identified as a “suspicious” person.
An image of the picnic table next to the AGR building matches the local sniper’s description of his location and confirms that Crooks would have been visible from the entrance of the building.
Crooks flew a drone around the perimeter of the Trump rally roughly a half hour before the sniper noticed him at the picnic table. FBI director Christopher Wray testified last week that Crooks flew the drone around 3:50 to 4 p.m. for approximately 11 minutes and may have been live-streaming the footage of the drone’s flight. The FBI’s analysis of the drone’s flight patterns indicated that Crooks had the drone face toward the stage that Trump would later walk onto.
At 5:38 p.m., a half hour before the shooting, a Beaver County sniper sent pictures of Crooks to another sniper group chat that included snipers assigned from Washington, D.C., texts show. The sniper observed that Crooks was using “a range finder looking towards the stage” and suggested alerting Secret Service snipers to “look out” for him. A few minutes later, a Beaver County sniper sent images of Crooks to the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit group chat and said “command” should be alerted to him.
During her testimony before the House Oversight Committee on July 22, disgraced former Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle estimated that Crooks was spotted two to five times before the shooting. Cheatle resigned the day after her testimony following bipartisan calls for her to step down because of her failure to answer basic questions on how the Secret Service botched its assignment at the Trump rally.
The Beaver County Emergency Services Unit created an after-action report detailing Crooks’s assassination attempt on Trump, full of maps showing the sniper assignments for various law-enforcement units and the locations where Crooks was spotted. The maps also display the location of the AGR building relative to the stage, and the entire perimeter encompassing the Trump rally.
Additionally, the after-action report features a detailed time line of when Crooks was seen and the communications that followed each sighting. The time line is extremely detailed for the hour leading up to the shooting, the attack itself, and the immediate aftermath. Texts notifying different “command” groups of Crooks’s presence were sent after the texts sent at 5:38 and 5:45, and law enforcement spent the next few minutes trying to figure out the direction of Crooks’s travel.
Six minutes before the shooting, at 6:06 p.m., patrol officers had a meeting outside the building to discuss the fact that Crooks had been seen around the building. At 6:12, Crooks fired the shots, and a Secret Service sniper killed him during the shooting.
The FBI is leading the law-enforcement investigation into Crooks and how he carried out the attack. No motive has been discovered up to this point, but the FBI is still going through his devices to learn more about him. The FBI will conduct a victim interview with Trump, a standard part of criminal investigations.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is holding a hearing Tuesday with Secret Service and FBI leadership on security failures surrounding the attempted assassination of Trump. On the House side, lawmakers recently voted to form a bipartisan task force to investigate the shooting, led by Representative Mike Kelly (R., Pa.), a Butler resident.
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