Pennsylvania law enforcement officials are accusing acting
Secret Service Director Robert Rowe of “misleading the American people”
by saying that local snipers at Donald Trump’s rally should have “looked
left” and spotted would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Beaver County District Attorney Nate Bible and Det. Patrick
Young, head of the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit, told CNN in an
interview Wednesday that the Secret Service had not reached out to
Beaver County’s snipers to speak to them before Rowe made his
accusations at a nationally televised Senate hearing this week.
“For the acting director to say that this is where our guys
were, and this is what they’ve seen, is a misrepresentation to the
American people,” Young said. “We were never asked what we’d seen or
where we were from Secret Service. I can tell you that again – the
pictures presented is again a misrepresentation.”
The Secret Service is falsely trying to blame other law
enforcement agencies for the failure to stop Crooks, Bible alleged.
“Before this incident, I would have thought Secret Service
is, like bulletproof. I mean, you’re not getting within 50 yards of
somebody important, even on foot, right, let alone, you know, a sniper
or something,” Bible said. “It honestly seems like, you know, they don’t
have answers, so they’re just sort of pointing fingers and passing the
buck around.”
Bible and Young said they are taking the criticisms from the
Secret Service personally and warned that the trust between the law
enforcement agencies has been fractured. Trump has said he plans to
return to Butler, Pennsylvania, for another rally, but the county
officials say they haven’t yet heard from the Secret Service or the
campaign about any future plans.
The Beaver County officials were part of a
multi-jurisdictional team assisting the Secret Service for Trump’s July
13 rally.
Rowe’s testimony – and photos he showed to lawmakers of the
site – has further exacerbated the tensions between local law
enforcement officials and the Secret Service have played out in the days
since Crooks climbed onto a roof near the rally site and fired eight
shots at Trump, injuring the former president and killing a rally
attendee.
The Secret Service has not responded to questions for comment from CNN.
Asked if he could confidently say that something like this
would not happen again at a future rally, Young said: “I cannot say
that.”
“At this point, me, along with the, I’m sure, the majority
of the American people, have many questions as to what and how the
Secret Service does their job,” Young said. “And I would have never said
that before this week really, with testimony, because the Secret
Service has not acknowledged – for everything that they say that they
did wrong, there’s a ‘but’ – and that but follow is usually assigning
blame to the local law enforcement or state police.”
The Secret Service declined to comment.
A federal law enforcement official familiar with the matter
said the Secret Service was and has been in touch with the lead for the
Butler Emergency Services Unit, which oversaw the Beaver County local
law enforcement officers and others that day.
The official also said that the counter sniper team was able
to take pictures of Crooks on the ground prior to his climbing on the
roof and questioned why screens on a window would prevent SWAT team
members from looking for a suspicious individual at a rally with the
former president.
During Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Rowe highlighted the
failures of communications during the Butler rally, saying that
information about Crooks was “siloed” and “stuck” in local law
enforcement channels.
He also said that local law enforcement was positioned in a
nearby building and should have had a clear line of sight of Crooks on
the roof – claims that the Beaver County officials dispute.
“I cannot understand why there was not better coverage or at
least somebody looking at that roofline when that’s where they were
posted,” Rowe told senators, displaying pictures the Secret Service took
in a re-staging of the scene. “Looking left, why was the assailant not
seen?”
But Young asserted that the photos Rowe displayed at the
hearing could not accurately capture the vantage point of the snipers
positioned in the AGR building.
The snipers had been instructed to be covert, meaning they
could not stick their heads out the window to see Crooks, Young said.
The photo the Secret Service used to show its viewpoint was
taken through of a window that had been secured and closed during the
rally, only opened after the shooting had taken place, according to
Young.
“Where our people were was the far-right side of the AGR
building. Their views in no way could have seen Crooks without pushing
their heads outside the window and looking back,” Young said. “The
videos and the exhibits presented to Congress are purely wrong as to
what they’d actually seen.”
Young and Bible said they are speaking out both to correct
misinformation that has come out in the days since the shooting – such
as false claims that the snipers were positioned inside the building
because it was too hot to be on the roof – and to combat public
statements that have thrown local law enforcement under the bus.
“It’s extremely misleading to the American people. I mean,
it makes our guys look incompetent to me to say, ‘Oh, well, all you had
to do is just turn your head to the left, and you would have saw this,’”
Bible said. “My reaction was, I was a little fired up.”
Bible added that there were screens on the windows where
their snipers were stationed in order to keep them hidden. The muzzles
of the guns were about a foot behind the window, Young said, and the
snipers were about three feet back, observing through the window with
binoculars.
“The screens were allowed to be in place because then it
allowed us to shoot through, but would not allow people to see in,” he
said.
“What they were instructed to do was focus on the secured
area in front of you – so, before you went in through security,
immediately after, before the stage. Watch those individuals – make sure
nobody snuck something past security,” Bible said. “Not to look at the
outer unsecured area where Crooks was. And so even if that was their
job, in that position, they couldn’t have seen it. They would have had
to been outside that window.”
One of the Beaver County snipers took a photo of Crooks
before the shooting that was shared on a text chain with other local
snipers. Young said that the sniper called in what he had seen to his
command through the Butler County Emergency Services Unit, though he did
not know if that information was ever relayed to the Secret Service.
“I can’t attest to who was in that command center or what
visibility Secret Service would have had at that point,” Young said.
One Beaver County sniper, Greg Nicol, left his post to
search for Crooks through other windows in the building, Young said,
though he added said that the Butler County sniper there remained at the
post, unlike what had been suggested in prior testimony.
Bible credited Nicol with potentially saving lives at the
rally because of his early identification of Crooks being
suspicious, taking a picture of him through a screened window and
sending it around.
“If it wasn’t for Greg Nicol identifying Crooks, so early
on, that is what allowed the Secret Service sniper to immediately take
him out,” Bible said. “You know, he did get eight shots off, but
otherwise, he may potentially could have unloaded a couple clips before
they knew where this guy was.”[SOURCE]
