(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Senate Homeland Security Committee released its interim report on the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump, revealing new info that raises more questions about what happened at that deadly event.
The 133-page report is underpinned by interviews with 12 Secret Service employees from the Butler rally, including the head of Pittsburgh’s field office, the lead advance agent, and the counter sniper team leader—who has been identified in the New York Times as John Marciniak.
However, the report revealed that the Senate hasn’t interviewed the sniper who killed the alleged shooter, Thomas Crooks.
“The Committee has requested to interview the USSS counter sniper who shot Crooks, but has not yet interviewed him,” the Senate report revealed.
Today’s Senate interim report on the Trump shooting has so many bombshell revelations I don’t even know where to begin.
Let’s start w/ the fact that the Secret Service sniper who shot Crooks still hasn’t been interviewed. Also, they DID have a clear line of site to Crooks’s… pic.twitter.com/DetO75dR6w— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) September 25, 2024
According to the report, the sniper was stationed on the barn behind Trump’s podium—giving him a line of sight on the rooftop used by Crooks. The report included a picture that showing that the Secret Service counter sniper team “Hercules 1” indeed had a line of sight on Crooks.
“However, the USSS Counter Sniper Team Leader [Marciniak] and the Hercules 2 USSS counter sniper said
they never saw Crooks on the roof prior to shots being fired,” the report noted.
Once Crooks began firing, it took “mere seconds” for the Hercules 1 sniper to locate him, Marciniak told the Senate committee. As Headline USA has noted, that statement is misleading—it took the Secret Service 15 seconds to return fire, and it was a local cop who actually shot at Crooks first, about five seconds after the initial firing began.
The Senate report didn’t remark on the exact time it took for the Secret Service sniper to return fire, but it did acknowledge the heroics of the local cop on the Butler Emergency Services Unit.
According to the Senate report, the local Butler ESU officer saw Crooks fire his eighth round and “saw the gas come from the muzzle, I heard the snap, and then immediately I returned fire.”
The Butler ESU officer told the Committee that he believed that he shot Crooks in the right shoulder or right side of his neck.
Bizarrely, the FBI has claimed it has “no forensic evidence indicating that [the round fired by the local officer] either struck our subject or the subject’s rifle,” the Senate report noted. If that’s the case, it’s not clear why Crooks stopped firing after his initial eight shots, and it’s also unclear why Crooks’s rifle seems to have a chunk missing from it.
The Senate report stated that lawmakers will continue investigating the assassination attempt, as well as the more recent one that occurred on Sept. 15.
Committee ranking member Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said federal agencies continue to stonewall his attempts to get to the truth of July 13—and he called for his colleageues to use all its power to get answers.
“Federal agencies like the Secret Service, FBI, and DOJ continue to withhold records that are vital to this Committee’s work. There is still much more information that the public and Congress deserve to know. Going forward, this Committee must be prepared to use compulsory process to ensure that the American people have a complete and thorough understanding of the security failures that resulted in the multiple attempts on former President Trump’s life,” he said.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
