The Secret Service has a lot to answer for when it comes to their actions the day that shots were fired at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, and among the many pieces of the puzzle that don’t add up, the fact that 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to access the roof of a building so close to the former president is perhaps one of the toughest to accept.
Crooks managed to get up onto a rooftop situated less than 150 yards from Trump, where he opened fire on the crowd, grazing Trump's ear, killing a former volunteer firefighter chief, and critically wounding two other attendees.
Representative Pat Fallon (R-Texas) set out to recreate the incident with his own AR-15 to try to better understand how things went down that day. He noted that he has never had long-gun training and has only shot his weapon on one occasion six years ago.
He recreated the conditions of the incident in Savoy, Texas, and reported his findings in a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing on Monday.
“I was lying prone on a sloped roof at 130 yards at 6:30 at night. And I knew that he had a scope. I didn’t know what kind, red dot or magnified, so I shot eight rounds from both,” he told the committee.
“You know what the result was? Fifteen out of 16 kill shots! And the one I missed would have hit the president’s ear. That’s a 94 percent success rate, and that shooter was a better shot than me. It’s a miracle President Trump wasn’t killed,” he added.
Crooks reportedly went shooting on multiple occasions and was a member of a local gun club, with his father.
Rep. Fallon’s comments came as he questioned Secret Service Director Kimbery Cheatle, who admitted to being aware of a heightened threat to Trump at the time of the rally.
“You just said you had the ability to beef up the security. You knew about the threat, and you didn’t. And that’s as telling as it is chilling,” Fallon told her.
He went on to point out that the shooter visited the location more times than Cheatle did, even using a drone to scout out a good position to fire from.
The question of how the gunman was able to get close enough to Trump to take such a clear shot at him – one that, according to Fallon, is nearly unmissable – was a big focus of the heated committee hearing, during which Cheatle faced repeated calls from both sides of the aisle to resign.
Sloped roof comment makes no sense
Cheatle also took a lot of flak for saying that the Secret Service didn’t place snipers on the rooftop from which Crooks fired because it was sloped, so they chose to “secure the building from inside” instead.
However, it was clearly not too sloped for a sniper, as evidenced by the fact that an untrained 20-year-old had no trouble shooting from it, and photos showed it was barely sloped and that agents were placed on other nearby rooftops that were more sloped.
Fallon told Cheatle that her “horrifying ineptitude” was a “disgrace” and said she should be fired immediately, while Representative Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) told her that she was “full of s—t” and said she was “being completely dishonest” after repeatedly sidestepping questions about whether her agency had complied with the committee’s request for a list of all law enforcement agents working at the site, along with all of the audio and video recordings in their possession.
Her evasive language throughout the questioning only deepened calls for her to step down. She resigned the following day in a letter taking full responsibility for what she characterized as a “security lapse.”
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