
Donald Trump disclosed that the Secret Service failed to warn him about the gunman who shot him at a rally in Pennsylvania last weekend, despite agents monitoring the suspect for hours prior to the incident.
“Nobody mentioned it,” Trump, 78, told Jesse Watters in an upcoming episode of the Fox News anchor’s primetime show.
“Nobody said it was a problem,” the Republican presidential nominee stated. “They could’ve said, ‘Let’s wait for 15, 20 minutes, 5 minutes.’ Nobody said…I think that was a mistake.”
Trump questioned how the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, managed to climb onto a roof with a rifle just 130 yards from him without the Secret Service intervening.
Police observed Crooks on the building 26 minutes before he opened fire and were alerted by frantic witnesses, but did not take action.
The Secret Service only responded after Crooks fired up to seven shots at Trump, grazing his ear and killing one audience member.
“How did somebody get on that roof?” Trump asked in his interview. “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 he’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,” Trump added.
Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks first raised suspicions when he passed through the security screening area with a rangefinder, a device similar to binoculars used by hunters and target shooters to measure distances for long-range shots, three hours before he opened fire.
An officer saw Crooks using the rangefinder and looking at his phone nearly an hour before Trump took the stage.
He was reported a third and final time minutes before the shooting. Two officers saw him on the roof and took pictures of the suspicious person for their alerts, which either weren’t acted on or received in time to prevent the tragedy.
The Secret Service has faced severe criticism for not stopping Crooks before he fired on the former president, with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle facing increasing pressure to resign.
Sources told The NY Post that top Secret Service officials repeatedly denied Trump’s request for additional security in the two years leading up to the assassination attempt.
The Republican’s personal security detail had to rely on local resources for the Pennsylvania event when the Secret Service headquarters denied its request for extra manpower, equipment, and technology, insiders revealed.
The ex-president’s security has since been upgraded to match that of President Biden.
Watters’ interview with Trump will air on Monday at 8 p.m. and will feature the Republican hopeful’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
{Matzav.com}
you know, when police are arrested for killing dangerous criminals, the secret service are gonna be afraid to kill suspicious young men