Can the U.S. Secret Service really be this incompetent? Well, a look at the long, long series of many, many failures committed by the agency sure makes it looks like they are 100 percent useless.
The failures are so catastrophic that they easily lead to questions over whether they planned to aid in Trump’s assassination rather than work to prevent it.
Just look at this time line… any minute during which would be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks should have been (or at least could have been) detained as a suspicious character. And as time goes on, he had more and more near interactions with police and Secret Service personnel that his continued evasion of their grasps is stunning.
3 p.m. Crooks was seen carrying a rangefinder at the rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania. His presence and possession of these odd articles was even flagged by the police.
5:11 p.m. Police spot Crooks creeping around the American Glass Research (AGR) complex more than an hour before the assassination attempt.
Around 5:30 p.m. another police officer calls in that Crooks is suspicious on his radio. An officer is sent to locate Crooks, but when he doesn’t see him right away, abandons the search.
5:45 p.m. a Beaver County Emergency Services Unit (ESU) team member stationed in the building sees Crooks walking around the building and looking up at the roof. Takes a cell phone photo of him and calls the suspicion in over the radio.
5:53 p.m. a Secret Service agent spots Crooks carrying a rifle and identifies him as a threat and calls it in, but does nothing else.
6 p.m. Officers observe Crooks walking up to the building again, sitting down, looking at his phone, and then using the range finder to look at the stage where Trump will soon be speaking. Again, it is called in but nothing is done to apprehend Crooks.
6:02 p.m. Trump takes the stage.
Just after 6:02 p.m. Butler Township Police officers start walking around the perimeter to look for Crooks, but he had already gotten on the roof by then. It is reported that a few minutes later an officer saw him on the roof, but retreated because he saw Crooks had a rifle.
6:11 p.m. Rally goers and others in the public begin telling any officer they could find that there is someone on top of the AGR building with a rifle.
At almost 6:12 Crooks opens fire and gets off eight shots toward Trump on stage only about 165 yards away.
As the shots rang out, the Pennsylvania State Police rushed to the building and began evacuating people from inside.
A few seconds later, two shots were sent towards Crooks and at least one struck him in the head killing him. It has not been confirmed what police or Secret Service operative fired the kill shot.
Now, notice what happened here. Firstly, the Secret Service did not spend any effort to clear or blockade a building that was less than 200 yards away from the stage where Trump would speak.
Then notice that Crooks was flagged nearly half a dozen times, but at no point was he hunted down and taken into custody.
Finally, note that Secret Service and/or police sharpshooters had him in their sights for several minutes before he opened fire, yet they let him situate his position, raise his rifle, take aim, and fire, before they finally did something.
All of this is a catastrophic security failure.
And don’t even get me started on the utterly useless female Secret Service females, one who is about a foot shorter than Trump but was put in front of him and was useless to block any head shots, the one that was so rattled that she could not holster her pistol, the one who was photographed ducking behind Trump to shield herself from any possible bullets, and the one that literally ran in circles clearly unable to figure out what to do (some of these may be the same person, but female agents did all these things).
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