Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump's rallies and events - despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump's detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
It's easier for counter sniper teams to carry their guns and gear in a van they can all use to transport the teams to the site for advance work for the event and then use the same vehicles, referred to by the Secret Service as "Push vehicles," to return to D.C. The alternative is for counter sniper teams to board commercial flights or Amtrak with all their gear, find a rental vehicle once on the ground, and then do it all in reverse on the way home.
At first, the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania had no Secret Service sniper teams assigned to it, but at the last minute, agency officials reversed course and decided to add two snipers to the outdoor event.
Local law enforcement snipers and their superior officers have said that they tried to keep the Secret Service informed about their concerns about Crooks, but their communications were siloed from the agency, even though they said they notified the site's Secret Service command center of Crooks' suspicious activity.
The Secret Service command center is supposed to be manned with both senior Secret Service agents and local law enforcement bosses to facilitate coordination and "Interoperability," as Cheatle testified during last week's congressional hearing.
The Secret Service counter sniper killed Crooks as soon as he had him in his line of sight, Rowe told senators in a close-door briefing last week.
Sen. Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, told RCP that Rowe told senators during the briefing that Crooks was hiding behind the lip of the edge of the building, and the Secret Service counter sniper shot and killed him as soon as he could detect his forehead above that lip on the building's roof edge.
Lawmakers have repeatedly asked why, if local law enforcement was tracking Crooks so closely, didn't the Secret Service agents detailed to Trump whisk him off the stage or prevent him from going on stage in the first place? But those familiar with Secret Service protocol under similar circumstances say there are always multiple suspicious persons being tracked at Trump's rallies and they often do not rise to the level of alerting the president's security detail, those five to 10 agents whose sole job is to provide immediate security for Trump and act as a human shield if and when a threat emerges.
Even if Secret Service received notification that local law enforcement was tracking Crooks and considered him suspicious, Secret Service agents wouldn't go into high alert unless they knew he was armed or on top of a roof, which texts show local law enforcement never observed or notified the Secret Service command center about - even though they appear to have flagged Crooks as engaging in suspicious activity, including pointing a range finder toward the stage at one point in the hour leading up to the shooting.
"Use of the word 'threat' would have changed things and Trump would not have been allowed on stage," a source in the Secret Service community told RCP. "A suspicious person on the far outer perimeter where eight cops are looking for him would not make 99% of agents keep the president off stage." If that suspicious person were reported crawling on a roof before Trump went on stage, then most likely the Secret Service would have prevented Trump from beginning his rally.
Then at 5:45 p.m. a Beaver County sniper sent photos of Crooks to a local law enforcement group chat with one Beaver law enforcement officer recommending that they alert "Command," though it's unclear whether that reference is to the official Secret Service command center.
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