Former President Donald Trump returned to the site of his near-assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday to hold a much-anticipated rally for supporters.
This marks the first time Trump has returned to Butler since would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks shot him on July 13. Though Trump escaped with his life, one rally-goer — firefighter Corey Comperatore — did not.
Videos from Saturday’s rally highlight the Secret Service’s July 13 security failures, especially those showing exactly where it has chosen to station Secret Service counter snipers this time.
Immediately following the July 13 shooting, questions over the security failure began to pop up.
Perhaps the most pressing of these was over why the Secret Service did not secure the rooftop Crooks opened fire from.
In a July 15 interview, then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told ABC News that no Secret Service agents were posted up on the roof because it was sloped.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point. And so, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” Cheatle said.
“And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”
On Saturday, Secret Service officials appear to have decided Cheatle was wrong about “sloped” roofs posing a security concern.
Did the Secret Service lie to cover up its mistakes?
Videos from the rally show snipers stationed on the sloped roof of a metal sheet building much like the one Crooks had shot from.
Snipers are positioned on the ‘sloped roof’ at Trump’s return to Butler, PA after assassination attempt
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 5, 2024
This is far from the first time Cheatle’s “sloped roof” security claim was called into question.
In July, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee grilled Cheatle over the claim.
“Do you remember in an ABC interview you did that you didn’t have people on the roof of the AGR building because you were worried about safety because of the slope?” Texas Republican Rep. Pat Fallon asked.
After Cheatle acknowledged she had, Fallon asked if there was a written Secret Service policy regarding sloped roofs, to which she said there was not.
🚨 BOMBSHELL! The SS Counter-Snipers were on a Roof STEEPER than the Shooter.
This is absolutely damning… and destroys the excuse of a “sloped roof” being too dangerous to have agents on the roof.
We are watching a cover-up folks.https://t.co/66t0YkCCZ2 pic.twitter.com/mXIfiHcEmy
— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) July 22, 2024
Cheatle later resigned on July 23, ten days after Trump was shot.
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