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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.
The comms situation sounds more and more like an absolute shitshow. Podunk or small-time operators underestimating how much impact even a small surge crowd can have on cell reliability is a pretty common sort of mistake to make -- even local femtocells/microcells often struggle badly, and you aren't going to get them in place for a one-off -- but the flip side is that it's so common that the USSS should not only consider it in planning but also have some (if jank) solution, here.
That doesn't necessarily mean indoctrinating every police officer near a USSS operation into Slack (b/c there's a few CJIS-compat other tools), but ... 900 feet is the sort of distance you can close with 150 USD in 2.4ghz links for data, and almost any radio for voice. Frequency deconflict (and since Butler County does seem to have used encryption, getting signed into the right trunk) is not trivial, but it's a minutes thing, not an hours one. There are arguments against introducing new technology in mission-critical situations, but 'train a handful of people to use new comms' is literally someone in that room's job.
All of that said, that this a) supposedly including transcripts and b) almost all of the local police leaves me more than a little skeptical its origin came from a pure-hearted interest in solving problems. There's been a lot of effort on the feds side to not-so-subtly point at the local cops, and this sorta release, especially with the pointed gaps for any comms to the USSS depot, would fit in that category very readily. Some of this is genuinely bad comm discipline -- the report's trying to highlight the Sheetz misdirection, but "we got him" is the sort of thing that should never be going over a voice channel in this sort of circumstance -- but they're the sort of problems that pop up when your swiss cheese model is down to the last bit of wax paper.
I don't know how much to trust Grassley (politician, mouth moving), but he's been claiming that the local police had a meeting that morning at 9AM, including specifically passing radios to sniper teams, which is what I'd expect, and that the feds didn't attend.
Plus, cell phone jammers aren't hard to get, I understand, and would be a pretty obvious part of any plot that was more sophisticated than "one guy with a boomstick." I can hardly believe that SS was comfortable relying on "let's swap cell numbers," that seems crazy to me.
I'm pretty certain that the USSS are used to a threat model of "one guy with a boomstick". The vast majority of people who shoot at a President are uncomplicatedly crazy.
Absolutely true, but imho they ought to be prepared for something more sophisticated than that. (It's been reported, for instance, that Iran is interested in retaliating against Trump for bombing Soleimani.)
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