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Not a large post, but a brief update on something I've been keeping an eye on. It looks like the Washington Post got their hands on some transcripts of at least police comms the day of the Trump attempted assassination here and, these are the three most relevant pieces of info you should know:
The first report that the guy had a gun was not until 30 seconds before shots broke out. Local police were tracking him down in the last few minutes, even mobilizing their own QRF towards the building, and apparently some felt until very late in the game confident they would nab him. He was spotted on the actual roof only about 3 minutes before (two minutes after first scaling the roof) and the sheriff inside the USSS post was told 1 to 2 minutes before about someone on the roof, though where on the roof was unclear to almost everyone. That the roof guy was not a cop was communicated however. Photos of the suspect had first started circulating 25 minutes before, but bad cell service means if many of these went through or not is unclear, at least some pics did not (these circulated photos include the 4chan pic, meaning it could have been any of the dozen or more cops in the loop who leaked it). So the most crucial period of time, that last 30 seconds, did not see the local post contacting the USSS at all, instead they were mobilizing the local QRF towards the building at the time shots broke out.
The local police and Secret Service command posts were different, far away from each other (900 feet or so and twice the distance of the rally site itself, and separated by a pond to boot), and with no direct communication line (they were using ad hoc cell phone calls, for example local cops would call a sheriff in the USSS post, which happened at least 3 times in 30 minutes). It’s unclear how quickly info disseminated to the USSS but it appears to involve at least four layers in the telephone game. With this in mind, we must ask ourselves how quickly did info make it down the chain in those 30 seconds? Apparently, the answer was not fast enough: the USSS was not notified that the shooter had a gun by the time shots broke out! We had seem some claims that the Secret Service perhaps did not open fire on purpose despite knowing about the threat, and those claims are much weaker now.
What was the local PD counter sniper team in the second floor of the building doing? Apparently at least one person was very mobile looking out several of the windows and moving internally, trying to track where the shooter went. He was responsible for the initial rangefinder call 20 minutes before and possibly the picture too. Most of their attention was in the opposite direction. The new timeline only has the shooter on the roof for about three minutes and identifies where he scaled the roof which was kind of in the middle of the complex - local PD including some taken away from traffic duties was tracking him around the outside, and where he scaled was on the opposite side as the window where you could lean out and see the final shooting position that was featured in Eli Crane’s video. The local sniper second floor's initial setup direction was a third direction away from the rest of the building entirely. I wonder how many people were on this floor and if any considered getting out on the roof themselves, I don’t think the article says, but it sounds like there was likely only the single guy! It's unclear what actions they were taking in the final two minutes.
I had initially said this was more likely a combination of bad inter-service communication, plus poor planning, plus maybe some local cop incompetence and a chance of ROE type concerns, and so far the info lines up pretty consistently with this. In other words, organizational issues, not malice, so far seem to be the overriding factors. Note we do not yet have or know many details about the Secret Service comms side of the story, AFAIK.
So incompetence , facilitated by maliciously denying Trump additional SS resources. As I understand there weren't many trained SS protection detail agents because of some Jill Biden event.
And let's not forget the constant Hitler comparisons in media.
Malicious? Ehhh, maybe? but probably not? We have definitely seen reporting that in general, resources were denied to Trump, and we also know that the USSS just as a policy (probably a stupid one, but it is what it is) simply does not provide sitting-president level support to nominees. Around the time of the event, there was a Jill Biden event, also an upcoming Joe Biden Austin event, but also crucially there were some resources working on the upcoming RNC convention too, and some agents had just come back from the NATO thing in Europe as well. WaPo for example specifically said that "multiple counter-sniper teams and hundreds of agents" were already sent to the convention! They also always have a fair amount of people moving around, but the core details don't seem to change all that much, so for example it's somewhat doubtful that Jill Biden specifically reduced resources for Trump, that doesn't seem to be how their scheduling works according to what I've read (though at the end of the day it is at least a little bit a zero-sum game, but that's just intrinsic to the process).
And in fact, both people in Trump's orbit as well as the Secret Service were, around this same time, apparently tussling to a high and loud degree about how big the security perimeter should be at the RNC, so it's even theoretically possible (I'm not sure how highly to weight this) that his own team's requests for more protection would have reduced, or even did reduce, protection at the Butler event. One thing we know for sure however is that at least for the Butler event specifically, there were no denials. (Still, as I think Jim Jordan put it, "Maybe they got sick of asking"). Examples of denied requests mostly related to wanting more metal detectors and related resources (potentially impactful in this case), and rarely but still occasionally counter-sniper teams, though most of these requests seem to have been centered around bigger, more public/natural appearances like in the middle of a city or at a football game or the like.
One thing I should have mentioned is the updated timeline answers one key question, which was "Why wasn't Trump delayed on taking the stage?" Trump had already been speaking for about a minute when the shooter climbed the roof. So I think most people would think the shooter's status wasn't quite on the level of delaying the event, and it's always a tough call to interrupt Trump mid-speech.
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