United States Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle speaks during a press conference at the Secret Service’s Chicago Field Office on June 4 2024 in Chicago, Illinois, ahead of the 2024 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
Kamil Krzaczynski | Afp | Getty Images
A U.S. Secret Service official on Wednesday said that a local Pennsylvania police SWAT team was actually in another building than the one whose roof was used by a would-be assassin to shoot at former President Donald Trump on Saturday.
The Secret Service official’s new account contradicts a prior claim by Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle that the 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks, was on top of the building containing the SWAT team near Trump’s campaign rally in the town of Butler.
Also Wednesday, a source familiar with the shooting probe told NBC that local police saw Crooks with a range finder, which is used to measure shooting distances, and that they had informed the Secret Service they were looking for Crooks with that device before Trump took the stage at the rally.
The new disclosures come a day after news that the Secret Service before Saturday’s shooting boosted security for Trump when it was told of a plot to kill him by Iran’s government.
The disclosures are certain to increase already sharp questions about whether the Secret Service acted appropriately in arranging security for the rally, which ended when Crooks fatally shot one attendee and wounded two others as he narrowly missed killing the Republican presidential nominee Trump.
The unnamed Secret Service official told NBC News on Wednesday that the building containing the local SWAT team was not in the building that Crooks climbed, and instead was in another building in the same business complex. That official said the building was connected to the one that Crooks had used, but could not say which building it was.
In contrast, Cheatle told ABC News in an interview earlier this week, “There was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.”
Map of the Donald Trump rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Source: NBC News | Google Earth
Cheatle also had said that the building that Crooks used as his shooting perch “in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point.”
“And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we would want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” Cheatle said. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from inside.”
Cheatle said that local police were assigned to secure the area, which included multiple buildings just outside of the perimeter set up by the Secret Service.
In a statement later Wednesday, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told NBC News, “The director’s reference [was] to the AGR Glass ‘building,’ which is a large manufacturing complex made up of interconnected dwellings.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Wednesday called for Cheatle’s resignation, saying her conduct has been “inexcusable” and pointing to her her rationalizing not putting snipers on the roof that Crooks used because “there was a slant” on its surface.
Also Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena for Cheatle for her previously planned appearance before that panel next Monday for a hearing on the assassination attempt.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the chairman of the Oversight Committee, in a letter to Cheatle, wrote that the subpoena was necessary because the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service “have failed to provide assurances regarding your appearance.”
