Former President Donald Trump told Fox’s Jesse Watters that he received no warning from the Secret Service about the possibility of a shooter at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last weeked.
Trump and his running-mate JD Vance sat down with Watters for a pre-filmed interview on Saturday that will air this Monday, on Jesse Waters Primetime.
The three men discuss the assassination attempt at length.
Watters asks Trump whether he was given any indication of the danger he was in.
“Mistakes were made. They were monitoring this guy for an hour beforehand. No one told you not to take the stage?”
“Nobody mentioned it,” Trump replied. “Nobody said it was a problem.”
“[They] could’ve said, ‘Let’s wait for 15, 20 minutes, 5 minutes.’ Nobody said…I think that was a mistake.”
Trump also questioned how it was possible for the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, to get on the roof in the first place.
“How did somebody get on that roof? And why wasn’t he reported, because people saw he was on that roof?”
“When you have Trumpers screaming, the woman in the red shirt, ‘There’s a man on the roof,’ and other people, ‘There’s a man on the roof and who’s got a gun’… That was quite a bit before I walked on the stage. And I would’ve thought someone would’ve done something about it.”
In the week since the attempt on the Donald Trump’s life, there has been growing scrutiny of the security arrangements in place around to protect him and failures by Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security.
The Secret Service has now confirmed that repeated requests from Trump’s security detail for additional manpower and resources were denied over the last two years, and in the weeks running up to the rally at Butler.
On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“Whistleblowers who have direct knowledge of the event have approached my office,” wrote Senator Hawley.
“According to the allegations, the July 13 rally was considered to be a ‘loose’ security event. For example, detection canines were not used to monitor entry and detect threats in the usual manner. Individuals without proper designations were able to gain access to backstage areas. Department personnel did not appropriately police the security buffer around the podium and were also no stationed at regular intervals around the event’s security perimeter.”
Hawley went on to allege that many of the DHS personnel were unsuitable for the job.
“In addition, whistleblower allegations suggest the majority of DHS officials were not in fact USSS agents but instead drawn from the department’s Homeland Security Investigations (HIS). This is especially concerning given that HIS agents were unfamiliar with standard protocols typically used at these types of events, according to the allegations.”
Hawley vowed, in his role as a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to “continue to investigate your department’s role in the staggering security failures on July 13.”
He noted that the DHS “has not been appropriately forthcoming with Members of Congress” and said that this was “completely unacceptable and contrary to the public’s interest in transparency.”
It was also revealed on Friday that shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to fly a drone over the Butler fairground multiple times in the hours before Trump spoke, as Crooks reconnoitered the site and planned his attack.
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