Recent police bodycam footage includes audio of a local police officer complaining that the Secret Service did not cover the roof from which the sniper fired shots shortly after the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
“I damn well told them they damn well needed to post people here,” a Butler Township official said in an audio recording obtained by The Wall Street Journal Thursday through a public records request. “I damn well told them that on Tuesday,” an official said in an audio recording captured by his body-worn camera. “I talked to the Secret Service people. They said, ‘Yeah, no problem. We’ll post people here.'”
The tape appears to contribute to the collection of information about security vulnerabilities that allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks to fire eight shots at the former president with an AR-style assault rifle before he was killed by a Secret Service sniper.
The crooks killed one rally participant and injured three others, including Trump.
A police officer in one of the new videos speaks of a suspicious person who eluded the authorities. The unidentified officer spoke of “a gentleman with a flat face that we were looking for earlier. He was scaring people.”
According to earlier reports, police saw a person acting suspiciously at the rally, later identified as Crooks, but lost track of him.
The officer’s radioed report was recorded by one of the body cameras.
“He was out in the woods by the water tower watching people,” he says. “I’m not sure if he’s the gentleman on the ground or not.”
A few minutes after the shooting, another officer arrived at the warehouse and said to a colleague, “I thought you were on the roof. I thought it was you. I thought it was you.”
The other officer replied, “No,” and explained that there were no officers on the roof, the newspaper said.
“What the hell,” the first officer replied, frustrated. “Why weren’t we on the roof? Why weren’t we?”
The Secret Service reportedly assumed that Butler County Emergency Response Unit snipers were assigned to secure the roof of the building from which Crooks fired his shots.
However, the local police official previously said that the leaders of the task force told the Secret Service during the tour that their snipers were on the second floor of the building, as the Wall Street Journal also reported.
Butler’s team did not want the snipers on the roof because they would have been exposed to temperatures above 90 degrees all day, the official said.
