The US Secret Service is facing fierce criticism after eye witnesses claimed they warned officials about Donald Trump’s attempted assassin several minutes before he fired on the former president’s rally.
One eye witness described how he and his friends raised the alarm with law enforcement when they spotted a man armed with a rifle crawling onto a nearby rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“We noticed the guy crawling, bear-crawling, up the roof of the building beside us, 50ft away from us,” he told the BBC.
“You can clearly see him with a rifle,” he said, describing how, despite “pointing at” the shooter, officers remained “running around on the ground” and appeared to not “know what was going on”.
He added: “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why is Trump still speaking? Why have they not pulled him off the stage?’”
“I’m standing there pointing at [the gunman] for, you know, two or three minutes. The Secret Service is looking at us,” he said, claiming the agents were “just standing there”.
From his vantage on top of a manufacturing plant, the gunman, identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was able to get within 500ft of the former US president.
He was armed with an AR-15 assault rifle. Multiple shots were fired into the rally, grazing Trump’s ear, killing one spectator and injuring two others, before Crooks was shot dead by a trained sniper.
It raised immediate questions about security failures by the Secret Service, the highly trained agency which provides current senior government officials and former US presidents with lifetime protection.
Given the round-the-clock surveillance he is granted, Trump, 78, should be among the most highly protected individuals in the world.
Republicans and Democrats have joined calls for the US Congress to conduct its own investigation.
Jim Comer, the Republican chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee, has demanded Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service director, appear before Congress for a hearing.
“There are many questions and Americans demand answers,” he said.
Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, said Ms Cheatle “and other appropriate officials” from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI will “appear for a hearing before our committees ASAP”. “The American people deserve to know the truth,” he said.
The FBI said it had taken the lead in investigating the attack. With typical understatement, Kevin Rojek, the FBI’s special agent in charge, said it was “surprising” that Crooks was able to fire at the stage before he was killed.
Crooks’ position on the roof was less than 150 yards from where Trump was speaking, the same rough distance from which, analysts have pointed out, US Army recruits are required to hit a scaled human-sized silhouette with a similar rifle to qualify in basic training.
The FBI is expected to identify how the security lapse occurred.
Allies of Trump have already condemned the failings.
Writing for The Telegraph, Alan Dershowitz, Trump’s former lawyer, said the incident had revealed “incompetence of the Secret Service in preventing even the most amateurish of efforts to kill a presidential candidate”.
“No armed shooter should have been allowed anywhere near any building with a line of sight to the speaker,” he wrote.
Mr Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, highlighted the fact that “the primary role of the Secret Service is preventive”, rather than “reactive”.
“One does not need to be an expert in law enforcement to criticise this most obvious and easily preventable breach of security,” he added.
The eye witness interviewed by the BBC speculated that law enforcement officials may have been unable to spot the gunman because of the angle of the sloped roof he was on.
this BBC interview with a guy outside the security perimeter who claims he saw the shooter before he fired is absolutely wild pic.twitter.com/vJpKZTxSAe
— Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) July 13, 2024
However, he questioned why they had not identified the blindspot and taken up positions on the surrounding buildings.
“This is not a big place… There’s only a few buildings around here. Why is Secret Service not on every building here?” he told the BBC
Former Lieutenant Tim McMillan, who said he has collaborated with several presidential and vice presidential security details, suggested the fault may lie with the “typically limited lines of communication” between Secret Service agents and local law enforcement on the ground.
Lt McMillan said the agency employs “a multi-tiered defence in depth approach to protective missions”.
An inner tier offers close personal protection of Trump; a middle tier, composed largely of local law enforcement, is tasked with identifying and preventing “mid-range threats”; and an extended tier, including snipers, covers long distance threats.
The counter sniper team, known by the code name “Hercules,” uses long-range binoculars and sniper rifles. This final tier, Lt McMillan speculated, may have failed to identify the gunman because its snipers “were scanning for threats at great distances well beyond the roughly 150 metres the threat appeared”.
“This is evidenced by the fact that the elevated counter sniper has to dramatically drop his line of sight to respond to the shooter,” he said in a social media post.
Hours after Trump was attacked, Florida congressman Michael Waltz claimed, without offering evidence, that he had been told by “very reliable sources” that “there have been repeated requests for stronger Secret Service protection for president Trump”.
That claim was strongly refuted by Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service’s spokesman.
“The assertion that a member of the former president’s security team requested additional security resources that the US Secret Service or the Department of Homeland Security rebuffed is absolutely false,” he said.
“In fact, recently the US Secret Service added protective resources and capabilities to the former president’s security detail.”
Mr Guglielmi added: “The former president, and the current president, are commonly subject to threats.
“The US Secret Service is constantly evaluating the very dynamic threat environment and responding to it in the fulfilment of its responsibilities.”
On Sunday, Trump’s team announced it had hired armed guards to work “24/7” at the Republican convention and advised staff to avoid campaign offices.
Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, senior advisers to the Trump campaign, told staff in a memo that their “highest priority” was to keep them safe.
They said that the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to begin on Monday in Wisconsin, would go ahead with “armed security presence with 24/7 officers on-site”.
Campaign staff were advised to avoid their offices – where security is also being ramped up – in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Washington until the buildings undergo a safety assessment.
