Secret Service Director Quits Following Congressional Grilling Over Trump Security Debacle
NATHAN SYKES
FOR DONALD TRUMP, the number 13 might be unlucky or lucky depending on whether or not you’re a glass-half-full type of person. He has a choice from his perspective, but it’s a fair wager he’d say the number was blessed.
On July 13 Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, leopard crawled atop the sloping roof of the American Glass Research (AGR) building in Butler (Building three), Pennsylvania, not far from where Trump was hosting a rally, took aim and missed killing the former president by a bat’s spit. It wasn’t so much that his aim was off, but that Trump turned his head at the nanosecond the bullet was fired, grazing the top of his right ear instead of blowing his brains out the back of his skull in a messy pink soufflé. We know the rest.
What we’ve learned since is even more damning than reports on the day in which eyewitnesses shared accounts of spotting the shooter and reporting his presence and location to the police. One witness even filmed a video of the sniper on their phone.
Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin initially summed up the irregularities surrounding the lax security at the Trump rally, at least those current. The Director of the Secret Service, Kimberley Cheatle has since resigned over her mishandling of security on the day. But this line of reproach comes from the relatively comfortable assumption that it was incompetent security to blame and not something more sinister.
Nevertheless, in the preliminary findings of his investigation into the attack, the senator learned:
- The Secret Service did not attend a security briefing provided to local special weapons and tactics (SWAT) and sniper teams on the morning of July 13, 2024;
- Local law enforcement said communications were siloed and they were not in frequent radio contact directly with the Secret Service;
- Local law enforcement notified command about Crooks before the shooting and received confirmation that the Secret Service was aware of the notification;
- Following the shooting, the Secret Service was seen on the roof of the American Glass Research building with local law enforcement; photos of the shooter were sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for facial recognition; and
- The Secret Service was initially not going to send snipers to the rally, according to local law enforcement.
Other factors featured. The SS pulled members of Trump’s regular security contingent from his task force the day before and dispatched them to Jill Biden’s rally in Pittsburgh instead. Their replacements featured women, or ‘diversity hires’ as the Right has amplified ever since the shooting (DEI is also being blamed for the CrowdStrike system debacle). One was so disordered that she was busted by a recording device fumbling the holstering of her firearm.
The agent was a ‘spare set of hands’ who rushed to help when Crooks began shooting. She was not in the loop and acted instinctively without prior briefing. It is unfair to criticise her. She deserves quite the opposite.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley received a post-facto message from a Secret Service whistleblower revealing that most of Trump’s security that day was not SS but inexperienced Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel.
There is no doubt that the agents protecting Trump acted bravely. However, the women weren’t equal to the task, because they lacked experience or men were better suited to the assignment. Each was a head shorter than Trump, who stands over six feet tall. They couldn’t have hoped to buffer him given the height disparity. This was apparent when the female agent used Trump as a human shield when she crouched behind the Republican nominee while the bullets rained down. Perhaps she did so in a panic, but we’ll extend her the grace of blaming the size differential.
Information about the shooter was withheld from them too, otherwise, they wouldn’t have broken the protocol whereby Trump would’ve waited in a holding area until the threat was neutralised. Somebody above them kept them from enacting that procedure.
No overhead police drone surveillance was conducted on the day but shortly before undertaking his plan, Crooks flew a drone and live-streamed footage of the fairground for 11 minutes. And it’s unknown why they didn’t investigate the ladder that appeared beside Building 3 which Crooks was perched on. Crooks brought the stepladder earlier and erected it during his recce of the area.
Moreover, he passed through the gates that evening without security checking his backpack. They would’ve discovered that he was also (according to reports) carrying a remote detonator, along with his DR-15 had they done so. Therefore, he was allowed to enter unchecked and his ladder was waiting for him at an unguarded building that happened to be within an excellent line of fire with the stage Trump stood on.
The Secret Service later admitted, bizarrely, that Crooks entered with them. They said he followed them into the rally perimeter by “following” them. They saw right then he had a range finder. But the account is murky (in that) he drove in without requiring security clearance. We’re told later Crooks parked a van a mile from the rally. Did he leave it there and return in a motor car?
In a movie, such a convenient plot device is called a MacGuffin. It defies credulity. Likewise, the angle that the two snipers we saw stationed on the roof of a building on the day were not those who killed the sniper. This was generally assumed immediately after the fact. They couldn’t see him from their position. However, another sniper could. At least, this was the story at the time. We will shortly learn that shots taken by a citizen prove he was in clear view the whole while.
At 5:10 pm, an entire hour before Crooks aimed his rifle and squeezed the trigger, a counter-sniper from law enforcement positioned inside the AGR building flagged him using a range finder. Range finders aren’t illegal but oddballs using them in high-security situations should raise flags. Did he report it? Of course, otherwise, we’d never know about it. But on the day, the order of communication was “siloed.”
The SWAT and police sniper teams were operating on a separate channel from the regular law enforcement. Instead, all information was relayed to Butler ESU command (Secret Service) who then passed it back (or not, in this case). It was an irregular communication setup since it hindered response times and withheld vital information from officers on the ground; namely about the shooter.
Regardless, the police sniper observed Crooks and noted him behaving suspiciously. Four minutes later the sniper snapped two pictures of Crooks, in one of which he is checking his cell phone. Another four minutes later he photographed a bicycle and backpack near the AGR building. He couldn’t say whether they belonged to Crooks and nobody knows what became of them. For that matter, what happened to the ladder? The FBI says he never used it but climbed onto the building otherwise.
At 5:32 pm the police sniper noticed Crooks near the AGR building handling a range finder. He reported Crooks in a group text to the sniper team. He was instructed to notify the command. At 5:42 pm he texted the Beaver ESU Group Command. After 19 minutes a Beaver County law enforcement operator got confirmation from Butler County SWAT that the message was received and forwarded to the Secret Service who were now aware of the suspect’s location.
This is where their story collapses. A rallygoer captured footage of Crooks lifting himself onto the roof of Building 3 in plain sight 150 yards away and running across it moments before he started firing. Fox News released the chilling video at the end of July. Disturbingly, the eyewitness filmed him while behind Trump as he stood on the stage. It is jarring because for once both Crooks and Trump are together in one piece of evidence. More importantly, it further impugns the response of police and federal agents on the day. The argument that they “could not see him on the roofline” falls in tatters. These are people highly trained in observing abnormalities in a crowd. What makes the video more ominous is that it was taken by one of the surviving victims of the attempted assassination, James Copenhaver.
Meanwhile, Johnson’s investigations revealed even more peculiar details. Twelve minutes after the shooting, and the confirmation of Crooks’ death, two Beaver County PA law enforcement agents arrived on the AFR roof to photograph the scene. Crooks lay dead with a (suspected) remote-triggering device and his cell phone nearby. Members of the Allegheny County Bomb Squad soon joined them. Accompanying them was a man in a grey suit whom the local cops assumed was a Secret Service agent. This man then said the pics of the crime scene must be sent to a number with a Philadelphia area code. The number belonged to the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms), which was odd.
The ATF wanted the pics of Crooks for “facial recognition purposes.” Johnson determined it was “unclear when the Secret Service arrived on the roof following the shooting, how they accessed the roof, and why the ATF was responsible for conducting facial recognition.” Johnson questioned whether they conducted any facial recognition on the photos at all. Moreover, the man in the grey suit has disappeared from the story. Nobody knows who he was. If they do, they aren’t saying.
The Secret Service had no intention of sending snipers to the rally but later changed their mind for “unclear reasons”. They originally told the Butler County police to “go in sniper heavy” passing responsibility to them. Similarly, the Trump campaign team requested extra Secret Service but was denied, a claim initially refuted by the SS. However, they subsequently admitted it. Additionally, the SS tried palming the onus for the AGR building’s security perimeter off to the local police, as if shifting the blame.
This claim was met with a furious response from the Butler Town Commissioner who insisted it was a lie and that the local police were assigned to traffic control.
Absent from Johnson’s report is any reference to the policeman who confronted Crooks moments before he opened fire on the former president, instead critically injuring two rallygoers and killing retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, 50, as he shielded his family. Two others were seriously injured. The cop in question was Butler County Sherrif Michael Slupe, whom a fellow officer hoisted up on his shoulders. He grabbed hold of the roof and raised his head in time to face Crooks looking back at him with the DR-15. Then he panicked. Crooks aimed the DR-15 straight at him but quickly turned back to Trump. Slupe lost his grip and fell some distance to the ground. That’s when Crooks fired, and was, in turn, killed.
It is reasonable to conclude that the police did their best. But they were obfuscated by the Secret Service for reasons that we can only speculate.
Yet, investigators have exposed other mysterious occurrences on the day, such as Clayton and Natali Morris on their social media channel Redacted. Clayton Morris is a former Fox News anchor while his other half was an anchor for MSNBC, CNBC and CBS. They reported on a shadowy figure filmed atop a water tower near the fairground, which emerges briefly from behind the tank during the shooting and then recedes. It is quite bizarre since no law enforcement was dispatched there that day.
The footage has so far passed without official investigation. Nevertheless, the audio has become a subject of analysis. One expert used a sophisticated program to isolate the sound of another shot originating from Crooks’s general direction leading to the theory that a second shooter was involved. No ballistics have been released or raised as a matter of inquiry.
In the aftermath of the shooting, another puzzling story broke, although, like many of the subplots related to the day, it has been subsumed by the greater whole. Finance blog Finbold reported how a billion-dollar asset manager shorted Trump’s stock before the assassination attempt.
Ironically, this plan was thwarted as Trump survived and his stock surged by 70% on the first day of trading following the shooting. However, the asset manager in question, Austin Private Wealth LLC, a Texas-based financial planning company was not alone. Extensive stock market activity targeting Trump stocks preceded the shooting. APW was the biggest, however, putting options on 12 million shares of Trump stock a day before the attack. The timing and scale of the purchase made it stand out, although the asset manager claimed they’d held the options since June 30 and only filed the paperwork on July 12th.
It is uncanny since a similar quiet stock market frenzy occurred before 911.
The official narrative came so unravelled that after being brutally mauled at a congressional hearing into the attempted murder of Trump, US Secret Service Director Kimberley Cheatle resigned following the second day. Beforehand, she appeared in an ABC (US) interview. Asked whether the Secret Service should have secured the AGR roof, Cheatle argued that it was a “safety” decision given the slope at the high point of the roof.
Texas Republican Congressman Pat Fallon excoriated Cheatle over this claim. The congressman emphasised that the roof had little more of a rise than a wheelchair access ramp. He then went on to demonstrate how rather than hindering a sniper it benefited the would-be assassin from his vantage point. However, he was mistaken in saying Crooks used a scope, which grants Crooks greater kudos as a shot since he relied on iron sights. Moreover, others drew attention to how police marksmen were positioned on steeper roofs.
Comedian JP Spears created a viral video mocking the Secret Service by recreating their version of events to nuance that the agents’ job is naturally dangerous and the operation was a farce. This is to say nothing about how the Director shorted the bounds of the security perimeter which practically invited a would-be assassin to take advantage of the 500-metre limit. Surprisingly, this point was sensibly raised by the insufferable ultra-liberal New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) at the hearing.
During intense questioning by Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene the SS Director froze when grilled about why she waited so long until the order was given to take out Crooks. She then dispassionately replied that she gave the order after he fired, to which Greene responded, “So, he was only considered a threat after he shot Trump.”
Greene reminded her that the crowd had, for over twenty minutes, been warning the police and Secret Service about the shooter on Building 3. Her response was, that she wasn’t certain how information about the shooter was relayed by people in the crowd to law enforcement. By carrier pigeon, evidently.
Cheatle had the nerve to show up to the RNC convention in Milwaukee which Trump bravely flew to following the attempt on his life. There, she was confronted by angry Republicans, especially Ron Johnson. They practically chased her into another part of the building as she attempted to avoid their questions about the shooting.
The woman that brought Diversity Equity and Inclusion to the Secret Service was a nepotistic appointment. Joe Biden selected her for Director in 2022 after she served 20 years in the Secret Service. A year earlier, Biden awarded her a Presidential Rank Award for excellent service, although, she had never handled a serious security threat. Before that, she worked at PepsiCo as senior director of global security. But she wasn’t guarding Doritos from terrorist attacks.
Cheatle’s experience with security details dates back to September 11, 2001, when she helped evacuate Vice President Dick Cheney following the attacks. She served on Joe Biden’s detail while he was Vice President during the Obama presidency.
Given all of that, and aside from never facing a critical challenge, it would be disingenuous to regard her as anything but competent to arrange a detail for Trump, who, unlike the others, is such a controversial figure that an attempt on his life was in the realm of the highest probability. She chose not to do a thorough job and her decision could only be intentional. Had the plot succeeded, and amid the widespread chaos that would’ve ensued, would she have been on safer ground? Or was she always destined, like Crooks, to be a fall guy—only if her mission failed?
And it is hard to let it pass without drawing attention to how appropriate her surname is: Cheatle.
To put the old tin lid on this strange and unsettling affair, FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared before Congress and cast doubt on whether a bullet even hit Trump. Perhaps it was “shrapnel” from an exploded monitor, even though the sniper hit no glass object. Wray was subliminally stoking Leftist conspiracy theories that Trump arranged to have himself shot. Imagine such a person heading the FBI, which is supposedly investigating the shooting, implying that the whole affair was faked. At the very least it’s irresponsible, but a not-too-deeper analysis suggests that it is entirely suspicious since if the facts are available to anyone, it is him. No sane person would buy that theory.
He did nothing to quell the increasing mistrust of the FBI and concerns about its political impartiality. If anything, he bolstered the ‘right-wing’ fears that the FBI was in on the plot to assassinate Trump—he practically taunted them with the implied truth.
Since then, the FBI admitted a bullet hit Trump. Any suggestion to the contrary was too much.
The question now is, how fast the establishment will work to make the public forget the shooting. They likely hope that events will move forward fast and that the people will be occupied with other things, especially as they tout their new puppet, Kamala Harris, after Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the presidential race. That is another dubious story in itself. It involves the inversion of democracy by the ‘Democrats’, a party who’s undemocratically ousted the doddering old ninny they chose to be leader when they stole the 2020 Presidential Election. Now they’ve inserted another useful idiot—giggling, babbling universally coloured air-headed DEI-hire—without the tedious formalities of a democratic election in the primaries.
Amid the constant allegations that Trump is a threat to it, Trump declared, “I took a bullet for democracy.” It seems beyond doubt that the Democrat machine, and its deep state, fired that near-fatal slug; Crooks was merely their mechanism.
Yet, did he make the decisive shot or was it the mysterious figure on the water tower?
Don’t think about it. Everything’s fine. There is nothing to see here. Until they try the next time they try to kill Trump, which, according to an internal Secret Service memo is “inevitable.” ■