Whoa! How Does This Happen Accidentally?
While I was writing the penultimate post about the lack of communication between the locals and Secret Service at the Trump assassination, this story (based on WaPo reporting) came out at Zerohedge:
For 25 Minutes, Secret Service In Command Center Never Notified Trump's Detail
Please notice several things in this article.
First, of course, there a was a command center. But understand, Secret Service was in total command.
Second, there were state police stationed in the command center. To my way of thinking that pretty much guarantees that there was a communication channel from the locals out on the perimeter back to the command center—and that turns out to have been the case. The locals passed the information about Crooks back to the command center. But action on the information passed back to the command center was all subject to the decisions of the Secret Service. Not the state police.
Third, that means that the decision to NOT inform either Trump or his detail—the agents surrounding him, and probably the snipers as well—was made by the top Secret Service person in the command center. The SAC from the Pittsburgh SS office.
Fourth, the Secret Service detail certainly had a line of communication back to the command center. We have previously heard that at least one of the counter sniper teams did use that line of communication.
Fifth. As I keep saying, the working assumption should be that the security detail on the ground did their jobs. What we need to focus on is the decisions that were made in the command center. Were they made solely by the SAC, or were his decisions—to keep everyone in the dark, to send Trump out on the stage with an identified threat still not accounted for—the result of input from higher up the command chain. Either before the event, or at the time it was all taking place.
While members of the Secret Service in a Butler, Pennsylvania command center were notified that an individual later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks was acting suspiciously before he tried to assassinate Donald Trump, members of the former president's secret service detail were not informed of the threat, according to the Washington Post.
Members of former president Donald Trump’s Secret Service detail and his top advisers have privately questioned why they were not informed that local police were tracking a suspicious person before that person opened fire on Trump at his July 13 rally in western Pennsylvania, according to people with direct knowledge of the concerns.
Approximately 20 to 25 minutes before Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at the former president, local countersnipers noticed him behaving strangely [i.e., suspiciously] and sent his photograph to a command center staffed by state troopers and Secret Service agents, the head of Pennsylvania State Police told a congressional committee Tuesday.
According to three sources, members of Trump's Secret Service detail have complained to confidants and others inside the agency that they were never made aware of the warning, and they had no idea that local countersnipers eventually lost track of Crooks - or that a local police officer who was hoisted onto the roof of the building saw Crooks perched there with a gun.
But the state police in the command center were notified of all the above, and certainly passed it on to the Secret Service.
Trump was on stage a full eight minutes - roughly 20 minutes after Crooks was spotted and reported - before shots rang out, wounding Trump, critically wounding two others, and killing one rallygoer.
"Nobody mentioned it. Nobody said there was a problem," Trump told Fox News in an interview last Monday. "They could’ve said, ‘Let’s wait for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes, something. Nobody said — I think that was a mistake."
Meanwhile, the Secret Service, which initially lied about denying Trump additional security requests, is not talking.
And the question remains—how long will the FBI be able to keep this investigation going without a resolution?
The Secret Service issued a non-response response to all the talk of a communications breakdown. They're going to "try to understand" what went wrong. Uh huh.
Q. Whoa! How Does This Happen Accidentally?
A. It doesn't.
To ask that question is to know the answer.