Trump assassination attempt — as the timeline becomes clearer, so do the failures

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate Committees on Homeland Security and Judiciary held a joint hearing to gather more information on the July 13 assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump. 

This was the fourth Congressional hearing held in 17 days, and this hearing involved the Acting Director of the Secret Service Ronald Rowe, and the Deputy Director of the FBI Paul Abbate.

The hearing brought out a few timeline facts that help clarify when Thomas Crooks went from one of several suspicious persons on law enforcement’s radar to a specific threat.

The following timeline was provided by Rowe and Abbate:

• At 3:51 pm Crooks flew a drone over the grounds of the pending rally site for several minutes, from a position several hundred yards from the secured area. This was not known to law enforcement until after recovering the drone from Crooks’ car after the incident.
• At 4:26 pm the first known confirmed sighting of Crooks was made by local law enforcement near the rally site. There was no specific threatening behavior reported.
• At 5:10 pm a local counter sniper team positioned inside the AGR complex of buildings, observed Crooks walking around the complex grounds and began watching him.
• At 5:14 pm a local counter sniper team took a photo of Crooks.
• At 5:32 pm a local counter sniper team observed Crooks outside the AGR complex browsing on his phone, and carrying a golf styled “range finder.” They notified their command post of the suspicious activity.
• At 5:38 pm a local counter sniper team forwarded the photo of Crooks to the local SWAT text group so others could watch for him.
• At 5:46 pm the Secret Service was notified that local law enforcement was focusing on a suspicious person outside the secure perimeter. This was one of multiple suspicious activity reports being monitored, which is the norm at large events.
• Between 6:02 pm and 6:08 pm, the local counter snipers lost sight of Crooks. (Earlier reports indicate that when they lost sight of Crooks, he was wearing a backpack and had walked towards the back of the AGR complex, out of sight of the local counter sniper teams who were inside the AGR complex on the 2^nd floor).
• At 6:06 pm a local fixed video camera captured video of Crooks crawling up on the AGR building roof closest to the secure perimeter. Investigators became aware of this after the fact. This roof should have been visible by the local counter sniper team(s) assigned to cover that area. It is unclear where those local counter sniper teams were at that time, and why they were unable to see Crooks or intercept him. 
• At 6:08 pm local police became aware that a person was on the roof of the AGR building closest to the secure perimeter. Several officers on foot began working to make contact with the person. It’s unclear if the local officers connected the person on the roof with the earlier “suspicious person” info aired earlier when Crooks was observed on the ground.
• At 6:11:03 pm a local officer hoisted another local officer up to the edge of the roof to get a look at the backside of the AGR building roof where a person had been reported. At this time, Crooks, who was laying on the backside of the roof, turned and pointed a rifle at the officer. The officer let go of the roof and fell to the ground to avoid being shot. The officer then aired on his radio that there was a person with a rifle on the building’s roof. This information would have gone out to all local officers monitoring that channel, including representatives from all participating law enforcement groups and the Secret Service stationed in the Unified Command Post (CP). It is unclear why that information was not aired by a Secret Service representative in the Unified Command Post, to Secret Service agents conducting counter sniper roles or those directly protecting former President Trump, but it wasn’t. Such information should have led to immediately pulling former President Trump from the stage.
• An estimated 20–30 seconds elapsed before Crooks took the first of 8 shots towards former President Trump. 
• 15 seconds after Crooks’ first shot, a Secret Service counter sniper positioned behind the former President fired a single shot and killed Crooks. In those 15 seconds, Crooks wounded the former President, two other rally attendees, and killed a third rally attendee sitting to former President Trump’s right rear.

The shooting represents an unacceptable failure on the part of law enforcement in general and the Secret Service in particular. Based on the information known, the following two issues are key to understanding why the assassination attempt wasn’t successfully prevented.

1. Secret Service and local law enforcement personnel failed to adequately secure the AGR building complex and prevent an adversary from gaining access to the roof.

The plan called for local law enforcement teams to secure the buildings and rooftops. There are conflicting reports that local law enforcement snipers were assigned to position themselves on the rooftop but ended up covering the rooftop(s) from inside one of the buildings. Whatever the actual plan was, local law enforcement failed to prevent Crooks, armed with a rifle, from gaining access to a roof under their watch that provided line of site access to the former President.

From my experience during similar events, there are multiple Secret Service agents assigned as liaisons to the various local law enforcement groups (uniformed officers, tactical officers, hazmat teams, etc.). These liaisons failed to ensure that local law enforcement teams were carrying out the mission they had been assigned, and ultimately this failure is the responsibility of the Secret Service.

Failing to secure the AGR building complex was an inexcusable lapse in security which allowed Crooks the opportunity to make a successful assassination attempt.

2. A breakdown in communication within the Unified Command Post (UCP).

Events like this involve several law enforcement agencies, with multiple roles, using multiple radio talkgroups (channels) to communicate. It would be pure chaos on the air if all the agents and officers were trying to operate on the same talkgroup. One of the key functions of the UCP is to have leaders of the various groups co-located in a room, so that information from the various groups is shared in real time. 

When the call went out that a man with a rifle was on the AGR rooftop, that information should have been immediately shared with all representatives in the UCP. It should have brought about a prompt call by the Secret Service representative in the UCP to have former President Trump removed from the stage while local law enforcement and counter sniper teams attempted to locate and neutralize the threat. 

According to Acting Director Rowe, that information never “made it out” on Secret Service talkgroups. What we don’t know is whether it was properly shared within the UCP, or whether the Secret Service representatives in the UCP failed to properly disseminate the information to Secret Service agents immediately. That lapse in communication is an inexcusable failure, and proper communication could have prevented Crooks from taking any shots.

Much of the remaining banter and theories about what should have happened or not, are political grandstanding. Claims of politically motivated denials of Secret Service assets to Trump events; suggestions that the Secret Service snipers saw Crooks on the roof 20 minutes earlier with a gun and couldn’t get authorization to shoot; suggestions that the Secret Service didn’t meet with local law enforcement the day of the event; the belief that a person with a range finder outside the secure perimeter was a “threat” that should have prevented former President Trump from taking the stage; hindsight suggestions that Crooks’ internet activity and shooting range activity should have put him on law enforcement’s “radar” all make for great theater in retrospect of the incident, but they aren’t grounded in any known facts.

Presidential visits occur throughout the country with regularity. At each of these events, law enforcement becomes aware of multiple people whose actions raise suspicion. People at these events go to great lengths (climbing trees and telephone poles, sitting on rooftops, looking through binoculars) to get a view of the President. Despite these occurrences, the shows go on until and unless a threat is determined. 

Notwithstanding the failure to properly secure the AGR building complex, there was no known threat that would have interrupted or cancelled the Trump rally, until approximately 6:11:03 pm, some 20-30 seconds before the first shot was fired. Once that threat (man with a gun on the roof) was known, Trump should have been removed from the stage and the threat neutralized.

There is no doubt that the success of the Secret Service in preventing sniper shots fired at a protectee since 1963 led to complacency in 2024. That complacency resulted in the death of one, the injury to three including a Presidential candidate, and the distrust of a venerable institution — the U.S. Secret Service. 

That’s a shame, but one that is relatively easy to correct. Correcting what went wrong on July 13 doesn’t require billions in new funding, technological communications fixes, total revamps of policy, or mass firings. It requires duty of diligence.