Speaking to host Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Republican, described the identity of the mysterious man in a grey suit who approached Butler, PA, police officers after the fortunately foiled attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
As background, a mysterious man in a grey suit approached the local police officers after the attempted assassination had occurred and been stopped by snipers. The man then asked the local police officers to send photos of the boy of the would-be Trump assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, to a cellphone number. That number was later determined to belong to an ATF agent.
Speaking about the matter to Bartiromo, Sen. Johnson said that staff members in his office immediately began reaching out to the local police officers in the wake of the attempted shooting to determine what went on and what went wrong with the law enforcement presence on that day and response to the shooter’s presence and climbing into position.
He first said that the Secret Service personnel did not attend the 9 a.m. security meeting the morning of the campaign rally, and so they weren’t there to discuss security plans. He added, “[The Secret Service] pretty well put in charge the Butler County law enforcement to coordinate things. Law enforcement wasn’t even on the same channel.”
Further, he noted that while the Secret Service had done site visits for the rally, they hadn’t coordinated radio channels with the law enforcement officers to whom they had delegated some of the outer security, saying, “Secret Service had been there for site visits, weren’t even there. It kind of turned over some of the outer perimeter stuff to local law enforcement. They weren’t even on the same security channel. So the sniper and SWAT teams weren’t on the same channel as the patrol officers, and they weren’t on the same channel as Secret Service.”
He then got to the weird incident with the man in the grey suit, saying, “So that sniper team that was in the AGR building, they’re the first ones that went up on the roof. They were the first to encounter the dead assassin at that point in time. Later on, other people joined them, and somebody told them to send the pictures they had taken to an ATF agent, which I think is very strange.”
Adding further details to the weird story about the mystery ATF agent in the grey suit, Sen. Johnson then said, “And we called up that ATF agent, that individual said that he was with ATF, and now he’s gone dark. We’ve also reached out to the Secret Service agents in charge on the ground. All we’re getting there is a runaround.”
Sen. Johnson also maintained that it is hard to have faith in the FBI to investigate the matter given the Russia hoax, saying, “I wish I could rely and have faith in the FBI and the Secret Service to do a truthful accounting of this, but that’s not been my experience with the Russian collusion hoax and for years, dealing with federal law enforcement. We need completely separate and independent investigations, and it has to start now.”
Watch him here:
Butler town manager Tom Knights, commenting on the local police attempting to deal with the shooter despite it not being their responsibility, said, “Once the suspicious individual was identified as being in the vicinity of the AGR building, our police, who were primarily assigned to traffic duty and traffic control, did in fact, because of proximity, move towards that building to try to find and identify.”
Knights added, “There has, to the best of my knowledge, not been any direct communication with members of the Secret Service to our officials. There are ongoing interviews with all law enforcement that were at the event, regardless of what their roles were.”
Watch Knight here:
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