Secret Service investigates how shooter got so close to Trump rally

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a gunman armed with an AR-style rifle was able to get close enough to shoot and injure former President Donald Trump at a rally On Saturday, Pennsylvania saw a devastating failure of the agency to fulfill one of its core missions.

The FBI identified the shooter on Sunday as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

The shooter, who authorities say was killed by Secret Service agents, fired several shots at the stage from an “elevated position outside the rally site,” the agency said.

An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos of Trump’s rally, as well as satellite images of the site, shows the shooter came astonishingly close to the stage where the former president was speaking. One video posted on social media and geolocated by AP shows Crooks’ body lying motionless on the roof of a factory just north of the Butler Farm Show grounds where Trump’s rally was held. In another image, Crooks is seen wearing a gray T-shirt with a black American flag on his right arm and with a bleeding wound on his head.

The roof was less than 150 meters from where Trump was speaking, a distance from which a good marksman could easily hit a human-sized target. For reference, 150 meters is the distance from which U.S. Army recruits must hit a human-sized silhouette to qualify in basic training with the M16 assault rifle. The AR-style rifle, like the one used by the shooter at the Trump rally, is the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M16.

President Joe Biden said Sunday he had ordered an independent review of security at the rally. Biden said he had also directed the U.S. Secret Service to review all security measures for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee.

Biden urged Americans not to make assumptions about the shooter’s motive. He said investigators would quickly investigate the attack.

“Unity is the most difficult goal of all to achieve,” he said, but “nothing is more important than that at the moment.”

Calls for an investigation came from all sides.

Republican Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday raising questions about the shooting and demanding information about the Secret Service’s protection of the former president.

“The gravity of this security failure and this terrifying moment in our nation’s history cannot be underestimated,” Green wrote.

The Secret Service did not have a spokesman at a press conference Saturday night where FBI and Pennsylvania State Police officials briefed reporters on the shooting investigation. FBI Special Agent in Charge Kevin Rojek said it was “surprising” that the gunman was able to fire on the stage before he was killed.

Members of the Secret Service sniper and counter-assault teams were at the rally, according to two law enforcement officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the investigation.

The heavily armed counter-assault team, whose Secret Service code name is “Hawkeye,” is responsible for eliminating threats so that other agents can shield and take away the person they are protecting. The counter-sniper team, known by the code name “Hercules,” uses long-range binoculars and is equipped with sniper rifles to engage threats from long distances.

Mayorkas said his department and the Secret Service are working with law enforcement to investigate the shooting. Ensuring the safety of presidential candidates and their campaign events is one of the department’s “most important priorities,” he said.

“We condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms and commend the Secret Service for its swift action today,” Mayorkas said. “We are in communication with President Biden, former President Trump, and their campaign teams and are taking every possible measure to ensure their safety.”

Green also pointed to reports that the Secret Service had rejected requests from the Trump campaign for additional security. A Secret Service spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, said on X Sunday that those allegations were “absolutely false” and that additional resources and technology had been provided as the campaign’s travel had increased.

Green said he would speak with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on Sunday.

Former Secret Service agents told AP that Crooks should never have been allowed access to the roof, and the agency must now determine how it happened. They said such a mistake could have been due to officers neglecting their posts or there being a flaw in the security plan for the event.

The agency had to “go through the security plan and interview a number of people from the director down” to find out what went wrong, said Stephen Colo, who retired as deputy director in 2003 after 27 years in the intelligence community.

Colo said presidential candidates and former presidents don’t typically receive the same level of protection as the sitting president. In fact, Colo said he was surprised the agency had deployed a sniper team at the event. Such a valuable resource – there aren’t many of these highly trained agents – is usually reserved for the president. Candidates don’t typically receive such teams.

Timothy McCarthy, a former agent who retired in 1994, said the Secret Service “better investigate thoroughly what happened there and do whatever it takes to find out” because the shooter should not have been able to get such a vantage point.

“How did this person get on the building?” asked McCarthy, 75, who took a bullet in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. “How could this happen? I mean, that’s the key to the whole thing. And what measures were taken to prevent this from happening?”

James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, said he has asked the Secret Service for a briefing and has invited Cheatle to a hearing. Comer said his committee will send out a formal invitation soon.

“Political violence in any form is un-American and unacceptable. There are many questions and Americans demand answers,” Comer said in a statement.

New York Democrat Ritchie Torres, a US representative, called for an investigation into the “security deficiencies” at the rally.

“The federal government must continually learn from security failures to avoid recurrence, especially when those failures have national implications,” Torres said.

Wisconsin Democratic Governor Tony Evers wrote on X that he and his staff had been working on Republican National Convention is scheduled to begin in Milwaukee on Monday. “We cannot be a country that accepts political violence of any kind – that is not consistent with our identity as Americans,” Evers said.

The FBI said it will lead the investigation into the shooting, working with the Secret Service and local and state law enforcement.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department would “bring all available resources to the investigation.”

“My thoughts are with the former president, those injured and the family of the bystander killed in this horrific attack,” Garland said in a statement. “We will not tolerate violence of any kind, and violence like this is an attack on our democracy.”

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Associated Press writers Del Quentin Wilber, Colleen Long and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.