Shocking and newly released police bodycam footage from the July 13 Butler, PA Trump campaign rally in which an assassin almost murdered the former president shows a heated exchange in which local law enforcement officer sounded off on the Secret Service’s refusal to heed warning regarding the location from which the shooter fired.
The footage was obtained by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch and shows the heated aftermath of the assassination attempt and the critical moments that followed in which the local law enforcement officers and Secret Service responded to the attack and angrily figured out what happened and went wrong.
The clip begins in the immediate, chaotic aftermath of the shooting, with a local police officer urgently requesting backup as the day’s chaotic events began to unfold. Then, as the clip continues, an obviously quite frustrated officer sounds off on the Secret Service for how poorly it deployed in the area and responded to warnings about the building from which the attempted assassin fired.
In that part of the clip, an officer exclaims that he informed them days before of where the vulnerable area was and that they seemingly ignored that warning. He says, “I f*cking told them they need to post the guys f*cking over here! I told them at the f*cking, the Secret Service, I told them that f*cking Tuesday. I told them to post f*cking guys over here!”
Chiming in, another officer snapped that he thought there would be someone on the roof to protect that area, but that there apparently wasn’t. “I wasn’t even concerned about it because I thought someone was on the roof,” that officer admitted. Another officer chimed in, saying, “I bet he climbed up here… I bet he climbed the wall.”
Another officer then noted that the Secret Service had been warned about the area and said they would put personnel in the area, but then seemingly forgot about or ignored the warning and didn’t do so. He said, “I thought we were going to post guys over here. I talked to the Secret Service guys, they were like ‘Yeah no problem, we’re going to post guys over here.’”
As the footage concludes, the officers attempt to respond to the situation in a proactive way and coordinate action to deal with any residual threats and protect the rally attendees and political figures. The footage also shows the body of attempted assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks on the roof in a previously unseen angle.
Watch the footage here:
The officers were far from the only ones to think that the Secret Service handled the situation, particularly the protection aspect of it, quite poorly. In the wake of the assassination attempt, former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was dragged before Congress to describe what happened and how it went so wrong.
Cheatle, who gave nearly no information of note to Congress during the hearing, resigned shortly afterward, just ten days after the shooting occurred. The Trump Campaign responded to the shooting by not just raising money for itself, but by creating a fundraiser for the rally attendees who were wounded and killed by Crooks. It raised over $2 million.
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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