Things That Don't Make Sense About The Assassination Attempt On Donald Trump

On Saturday, July 13, 2024, former U.S. President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump stood in front of a crowd of supporters in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a series of cracks were heard through the air. Trump grabbed his ear, he and the crowd ducked down, and Trump's secruity detail ushered him off stage, bleeding, his fist raised to the air. Trump survived an assassination attempt, but his would-be killer didn't. Secret Service shot and killed suspect 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks on the scene. Reuters notes he fired an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle from a nearby roof. Two people were injured, and one person died. 

Investigations into the assassination attempt are ongoing. According to available information Crooks was a resident of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, and a registered Republican. In 2021, he reportedly donated $15 to ActBlue, a Democratic political action committee. As the BBC notes, he graduated from high school the following year in 2022. His firearm reportedly belonged to his father. Beyond these basic facts, information is scarce, including Crooks' motivations. 

That said, certain things about the assassination attempt stand out as inconsistent. As the New York Post reports, multiple witnesses allege that they saw Crooks on the roof and tried to tell police, who did not act. 

The New York Post shared multiple accounts of individuals saying that they saw would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks crawling on the roof in the minutes leading up to taking aim. In a BBC interview uploaded to X, formerly Twitter, one of these witnesses said that Crooks was visible for several minutes. He added that several attendees were pointing at Crooks and trying to get the attention of the Secret Service. "They [the Secret Service] were looking at us the whole time we were standing over by that tree," he said, but admits that Crooks was probably "behind where they could see" because of the slope of the roof where he was laying down. Also on X , another witness describes seeing Crooks "on top of one of the buildings go in between one building to the next." He noted law enforcement was made aware.

While human error is a possibility, it does comes off as negligent that members of the crowd report seeing Crooks in the open leading up to him firing shots while Secret Service and local police couldn't. As a result, controversial X owner Elon Musk spoke up on the platform saying, "The head of the Secret Service and the leader of this security detail should resign."

One of the witnesses raised another unusual point about the assassination attempt. As seen on X, he asked, "Why is there not Secret Service on all of these roofs, here?" Looking at the BBC's picture of the event area, Trump's stage was located in front of three side-by-side buildings with sloped, triangular roofs. There's another smaller building kitty-corner to the stage area, and a larger factory on the other side past some trees. While Thomas Matthew Crooks took fire from the factory — the furthest of all available roofs — the roughly 150-yard distance between that roof and Trump's stage was certainly within range for an assailant with a rifle to make a fatal shot.

ABC News reports that the Secret Service is currently following this exact line of questioning. Crooks, as it turns out, was wearing "gray camouflage" while remaining as still as possible once in position. The distance at which he fired, meanwhile, is within the range that U.S. Army recruits have to demonstrate capable marksmanship by hitting a target with an M16 — a military weapon comparable to Crooks' AR rifle. And after Crooks fired several shots, the Secret Service counter-sniper team at the scene shot and killed him. In other words, it stands to reason that Trump's protective detail could have had a visual of the unguarded roof in range of Trumps' stage and taken note of a security threat.

When The Washington Post analyzed video that had been posted to social media, they confirmed that filming had started two minutes and two seconds before the first shots were fired, and 86 seconds passed between the first attempts at warning authorities and the shooting. It has also since come out that local law enforcement officers had been aware of the presence of an individual deemed to be acting suspiciously long before that, and had actually flagged Thomas Matthew Crooks as a potential threat before he even entered the rally.

An unnamed U.S. official told NBC News that Crooks had been described as pacing back and forth and behaving in a noticeably strange way, while still near the magnetometers that had been set up as a part of the rally's security. (Magnetometers are triggered by the presence of metallic objects — such as weapons — and it was not immediately clear if Crooks had avoided the checkpoints.) 

Local authorities had considered Crooks suspicious enough that they had set off to pursue him on foot, and reportedly relayed that information to the Secret Service. Former Secret Service agents have questioned why plainclothes agents were not sent to respond to the reported threat. And though the timeline initially remained unclear, later reports revealed yet another thing that doesn't make sense about the incident.

As mentioned, the U.S. Secret Service was made aware of a suspicious person with a rangefinder as Thomas Matthew Crooks scouted the rally. According to CBS News, two sources familiar with a congressional briefing on the assassination attempt said the agents relayed the sighting via radio by 5:52 p.m., about 19 minutes before the suspect shot at Trump. Elsewhere, sources told NBC News that Pennsylvania State Police were aware of Crooks an hour before the shooting — and it took local authorities 30 minutes to relay this information to the Secret Service. "This was a 100% cover-your-ass briefing," Senator John Barrasso said in a statement after the meeting. "He had a range finder and a backpack. The Secret Service lost sight of him."

One source told Fox News that sometime on Saturday, Crooks' parents notified law enforcement that their son was missing along with his father's AR-style 556 rifle. Police did not divulge what — if any — action they took after being contacted by the would-be assassin's family. Why Crooks wasn't questioned, and why Trump was allowed to take the stage are two of many concerns now swirling around the disastrous reports of what went wrong before the attempted assassination.

Major questions have been raised as to the security procedures that left the roof of the AGR International warehouse unguarded and unoccupied by law enforcement. At just less than 150 yards away from the stage where Donald Trump would be speaking, it seems as though it should have been identified as a potential security risk. According to a former Secret Service agent who spoke with NBC News, "Someone should have been on the roof or securing the building so no one could get on the roof."

And here's where things get complicated. Sources told the media outlet that although the Secret Service had identified the building as a potential problem, they had also told local law enforcement that they were going to be responsible for securing that particular building. However, Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said (in part), "The Secret Service ran the show. ... To me, the whole thing is under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service."

Several days after the shooting, news outlets were still not reporting any concrete answers as to how Thomas Matthew Crooks got up on the roof of the building (it was later reported he likely used the air coniditoner unit), and why the building hadn't been included in the Secret Service's secured perimeter of the rally. In an interview with ABC News, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle acknowledged that there were "a number of buildings in that outlying area" that were similarly assigned to local law enforcement for security. Later reports suggested a lack of manpower.

In a post-assassination attempt interview with ABC News, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was asked about security arrangements. She reiterated the fact that security of the building used to target Donald Trump with an assassination attempt had been handed off to local police, and also explained why there were no law enforcement personnel on the roof: "That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point. And so, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside."

Later, however, a representative of local law enforcement told The New York Times that no, that was incorrect. They said that their officers were in an adjacent building, contrary to what the director of the Secret Service had said. The Times reported that in an unofficial statement, representatives of local law enforcement said that their countersnipers had been positioned on the second floor of another building and had been specifically instructed to watch the crowd, not to secure buildings. Meanwhile, former Secret Service agents have also stated that the presence of a sloped roof is not a factor that unconditionally rules out a building as a location for a sniper or other officers, and it was also pointed out that another nearby building with an even steeper, sloped roof was occupied by Secret Service snipers at the time of the shooting.

According to ABC News, law enforcement officials said Secret Service snipers locked-on to Thomas Matthew Crooks 11 seconds after his first shot, and 15 seconds later they shot him dead. But sources told the outlet the team spotted the suspect on the roof of the building at 5:52 p.m., 20 minutes before the attack. As reported by The New York Times, the structure was outside the agency's security zone, and the team left the area in the hands of local law enforcement. No police officers were stationed on the roof.

Two retired snipers, a former Secret Service agent, and a former marine sniper told The Washington Post the slant of the roof and the surrounding trees likely made it difficult for the two sniper units to acquire their target. Jason Lawless, a retired officer who worked as a sniper with the Tulsa Police Department, said after Crooks took his first shots, one of the snipers on the northern team flinched and took his eye away from the scope before resetting his position. Before Crooks opened fire, the second sniper team — the southernmost one — reoriented itself, which the Post suggested could mean it was aware of the threat.

Audio experts heard 10 gunshots across the footage of the incident and told the Post that the first eight — fired in six seconds — had similar audio signatures. Immediately after this flurry of bullets, another came from a different location, followed by the final shot 16 seconds after Crooks began shooting — and both had different acoustic characteristics than the first eight. Though they noted this type of analysis is not 100% accurate, it suggests the security locked-on to Crooks about six seconds. after he started shooting.

It certainly made for an iconic photo — Donald Trump with a bloodied ear, his fist in the air amid an assassination attempt. The image came right after the former president was allowed to put on his shoes. And the fact that the Secret Service allowed Trump to expose himself in such a situation has drawn scrutiny, as has how long officials took to get him off the stage.

Secret Service agents are trained to assume there are multiple shooters, and if there happened to another on July 13, the former president might have been killed. "Let me get my shoes on," Trump said amid the chaos. "Sir, we've got to move to the cars," one agent told him shortly after. "Let me get my shoes on," he repeated, before they let him do so.

It's a decision that has caused a strong reaction from experts. "The moment you know you are getting incoming rounds, you grab hold on to that boss and you throw him into a car and you get out of there as quickly as you can with the maximum amount of aggression," Richard Aitch, a U.K. close protection expert and former member of the Royal Military Police, told NBC News. "They stayed on that stage for over a minute," he said elsewhere. "What on Earth were they doing? It was shocking."

"If that's me there, no," Jeffrey James, a retired 22-year Secret Service veteran, told The New York Times. "We are going, and we are going now. If it's me, I'm buying him a new pair of shoes."

Sources told The Washington Post that local police contacted the Secret Service before the fateful Saturday rally to tell the agency they didn't have enough resources to station anyone at the building Thomas Matthew Crooks used to take aim at Donald Trump. Though regional units were responsible for the area, at this point it's unclear why the agency didn't take steps to address the issue with its own resources, if any were available. "The Secret Service doesn't have unlimited resources in terms of agents that they can post everywhere," Jason Russell, a former Secret Service agent, told the BBC. 

In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan suggested that a lack of resources was indeed an issue. "Whistleblowers have disclosed to the Committee that the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) did not have proper resources for President Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania because of staffing shortages due to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit and First Lady Jill Biden's event in Pittsburgh," he wrote, per ABC News. According to Roll Call, any security lapses at the rally shouldn't have been due to lack of funding. The outlet noted the Secret Service received over 9 percent more in overall appropriations for the fiscal 2024 year. The final number? A whopping $3.1 billion, nearly $100 million more than President Joe Biden had requested. Notably, protective operations, which is what finances daily security for heads of state. received $1.4 billion, a boost of approximately 24 percent.

According to the FBI, Thomas Matthew Crooks used an AR-style 556 rifle with 5.56 mm ammunition in his assassination attempt. A similar weapon was used in the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting that killed 14 people and wounded 22 and the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting that killed 20 children and six adults. The exact model is not known, but the Ruger AR-556 has a barrel length of about 1.5 feet and has an overall length of 2.5 to 3 feet, weighing about 6.5 pounds. How Crooks was able to get such a weapon into the rally has been the focus of scrutiny.

According to CBS News, a person familiar with the investigation told the outlet that authorities believe Crooks may have hid the weapon beforehand or smuggled it in with his backpack. Given that he used an air conditioner unit to get onto the roof he fired from, officials believe he might have stashed the weapon near the unit. A Secret Service source told Fox News that Crooks indeed hid the weapon before the rally, though where is still unclear. "We went from golf range finder to AR-15, and now we have to fill in the gap," the source said.