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.”
